Slate Articleshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead.fulltext.all.rss
Stories from SlateLube Jobhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2011/07/lube_job.html
<p><em>Fresh off <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/01/santorum_ties_romney_in_iowa_can_he_repeat_the_comeback_in_new_hampshire_.html">his virtual tie for first in the Iowa caucuses</a> on Tuesday night, Rick Santorum’s campaign has renewed momentum heading into next week’s New Hampshire primary. The former Pennsylvania senator’s recent political success hasn’t yet dislodged an alternate definition of </em>santorum<em><strong><u></u></strong> from the top of Google’s search results. Back in July, Chris Wilson assessed Santorum’s “Google problem” and investigated his chances to reclaim the top result from Dan Savage’s neologism. The original piece is reprinted below.</em></p>
<p>Until Rick Santorum declared in early June that <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2011/06/exclusive-rick-santorum-we-are-in-it-to-win.html">he was running for president</a>, his &quot;Google problem&quot; was little more than a case study in Internet karma. Eight years ago, after Santorum told the Associated Press that he had &quot;<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-04-23-santorum-excerpt_x.htm">a problem with homosexual acts</a>,&quot; sex columnist Dan Savage launched a <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=14422">retaliatory campaign</a> to name a sex act after the then-Pennsylvania senator. The winning entry in the define <em>santorum</em> contest was this: &quot;the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.&quot;</p>
<p>This was just the beginning of the <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/word/word.php?date=Feb-23-2010">logomachy</a>. Savage started a website, <a href="http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/">Spreading Santorum</a>, devoted to the definition's proliferation, and it worked as intended. Enough people wrote about and linked to Spreading Santorum that, for the past several years, it has generally stood as the top search result for both &quot;Santorum&quot; and &quot;Rick Santorum.&quot; It was a classic &quot;<a href="http://howto.wired.com/wiki/'Google_Bomb'_an_Enemy">Google bomb</a>,&quot; the practice by which a disparaging page gets boosted in search results to debase the targeted person's name. And there was nothing Rick Santorum could do about it—everyone who searched for him would see his name associated with anal sex.</p>
<p>With Santorum back in the picture after a five-year absence from politics—he lost his bid for re-election in 2006—this web skirmish is suddenly the subject of <a href="http://www.rollcall.com/issues/56_84/-203455-1.html">serious news stories</a> and <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/06/rick_santorums_supporters_are.html">campaigns by supporters</a> to dethrone Savage's page from the top of the results. &quot;What we can do as Christians is to fight back with a Google-bombing campaign of our own,&quot; wrote one ally on a page that has <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fixing-Santorums-Google-Problem/228980680446930?sk=info">since been co-opted</a> by the opposition. Savage has <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/50052.html">vowed to renew his own efforts</a> in response. The battle over the true meaning of <em>Santorum</em> has begun, and the outcome will tell us a lot about Google's perception of what a search engine should be.</p>
<p>The only reason that Google bombs work is that the company's algorithms are imperfect. The results generated for a particular query are supposed to be organic—the pages most relevant to you, the searcher, based on a huge variety of factors. Those factors are both personal—your search history, what your friends are linking to on Twitter, where you live—and universal—how many pages link to a given site, the page's keywords, and so forth. In an ideal world, those results should not be subject to intentional manipulation, and Google goes to great lengths to prevent this sort of behavior. Most <a href="http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/incredible-google-bombs.html">famous Google bombs</a>, like the one that returned George W. Bush's official biography on a search for &quot;miserable failure,&quot; are <a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-kills-bushs-miserable-failure-search-other-google-bombs-10363">eventually defused</a> when Google closes whatever loophole the bombers had exploited.</p>
<p>SpreadingSantorum.com, though, has managed to stay on top. For the past few years, Savage's site has not had legitimate competition from any Web page for top-Santorum-search-result honors. (The closest competitor: the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%2522santorum%2522_neologism">Wikipedia page about the neologism</a>.) The best estimates suggest that SpreadingSantorum.com has about <a href="http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.spreadingsantorum.com/www.ricksantorum.com/a!comparison">six times</a> as many incoming links as Rick Santorum's official website. One of the biggest myths about the Google search algorithm, however, is that it ranks pages primarily based on inbound linkage. While this was Google's <a href="http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html">founding principle</a>, the site's algorithms are now far more complex. Most search engine experts will tell you that the importance of link proliferation has <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-rankings-algorithm-has-changed-over-time-">declined steadily over time</a>—something Google employees will privately confirm in general terms.</p>
<p>The decreasing importance of inbound links means the &quot;frothy mix&quot; definition of <em>santorum</em> may soon lose its search primacy. Traditionally, the easiest way to set a Google bomb has been to encourage supporters to link to a particular page. With linking no longer as important, it's significantly harder to boost a page's ranking artificially. Furthermore, Google weighs the <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/where-googles-algorithm-overhaul-is-good-news/">timeliness of content</a> much more than it used to. This will probably reward Santorum the politician, who is now making news for non-anal-sex-related reasons. Even though Dan Savage has <a href="http://blog.spreadingsantorum.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&amp;updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&amp;max-results=39">launched a new blog</a> on SpreadingSantorum.com in an attempt to remain relevant, it's unlikely that he can compete with even the small trickle of news that Santorum's campaign will generate. As the primaries approach, the proportion of news about him that does not include sex acts will rise. That's why I predict that, within a few months, Rick Santorum will take back the top spot on search results for his name.</p>
<p>Is this a bad thing? Google co-founder Larry Page's <a href="http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tech.html">vision of a perfect search engine</a> is one that &quot;understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.&quot; It's hard to imagine that many people who search for &quot;Rick Santorum&quot; want to get Dan Savage's site. While I have little sympathy for Santorum, this is clearly a case in which Google is not working as intended. A more perfect search engine would not be so easily gulled.</p>
<p>At the same time, it's fair to say that SpreadingSantorum.com is something more than a Google bomb. It's a form of political protest—a campaign that has survived for eight years because lots of people believe that Santorum deserves to have his name dragged through the … not-so-palatable substance. When <em>Roll Call</em> asked Santorum about <em>santorum</em>, he <a href="http://www.rollcall.com/issues/56_84/-203455-1.html">characterized it</a> as a hall of mirrors: &quot;It's one guy. You know who it is. The Internet allows for this type of vulgarity to circulate.&quot; In this, he is dead wrong: If this were just the work of Dan Savage, Spreading Santorum would be nowhere near the top of the search results.</p>Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:30:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2011/07/lube_job.htmlChris Wilson2012-01-04T17:30:00ZShould Google associate Rick Santorum's name with anal sex?TechnologySantorum Google problem: Should the search engine associate Rick Santorum's name with anal sex?100120104009santorumChris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2298206falsefalsefalseSantorum Google problem: Should the search engine associate Rick Santorum's name with anal sex?Santorum Google problem: Should the search engine associate Rick Santorum's name with anal sex?Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty Images,Presidential candidate Rick Santorum came in a close second to Mitt Romney at the Jan. 3 Iowa caucasOsamaBinRaided.com, Going Once, Going Twice …http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2011/05/osamabinraidedcom_going_once_going_twice_.html
<p>&quot;You want to make a million dollars?&quot; Ezra Azizo asked Maurice Harary at half past midnight Monday morning, an hour after President Obama announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. By 4:30 a.m., with the help of Azizo and an assistant in India, Harary had launched osamadeadtees.com. By 8 a.m., visitors had placed 500 orders. By the time I first called him on Tuesday, Harary said he'd sold 10,000 shirts. By Wednesday afternoon, he'd hired his fourth part-time employee.</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.osamadeadtees.com/">Osamadeadtees.com</a> is one of the roughly 2,000 Bin Laden-related domain names that have been registered since the terrorist leader's death, most within hours of when the news broke. Merchandisers, domain speculators, and advertisers are all rushing to secure the most straightforward, memorable addresses for their websites—or for addresses they think someone will pay more than the $10-or-so cost of securing it. To get these numbers, I downloaded the <a href="http://dailydomains.org/">DailyDomains.org</a> list of the approximately 200,000 domains newly registered on May 2 and May 3 and tallied the number of names that included &quot;osama,&quot; &quot;usama,&quot; &quot;binladen,&quot; &quot;bin-laden,&quot; &quot;binladin,&quot; or &quot;bin-ladin.&quot; (By comparison, DailyDomains lists fewer than 1,500 registrations containing &quot;japan,&quot; &quot;quake,&quot; or &quot;tsunami&quot; for March 10, 11, and 12.) They range from the concise (osamarip.com) to the bewilderingly long (osamabinladenwaskilledonmayfirsttwothousandeleven.com), and from the celebratory (adiososama.com) to the paranoid (osamaconspiracy.com).</p>
<p>When we spoke, the Brooklyn-based Harary hadn't slept in two days. &quot;I'm just pumping, I'm not stopping. I'm just moving, moving, moving,&quot; he told me. Harary has worked the holidays at some retail stores in the past. This year, he says, &quot;Santa Claus rolled up in May.&quot;</p>
<p>After paying for the shirt manufacturing, Google ads, and other traffic-drivers, Harary says he profits $1 for every shirt, which he's selling for $12. The <a href="http://www.osamadeadtees.com/product/t-shirts/osama-dead-tee/gray.html">best-selling design</a> portrays Bin Laden's eyes X'ed out and a brushstroke across his mouth, all in red—a sort of morbid take on the familiar smiley face. Harary says most of his visitors come from major cities, with strong representation from Midwestern cities like Cleveland and Chicago.</p>
<p>The rush to grab Bin Laden-related domains &quot;seems similar&quot; in intensity to the rushes for domains connected to the Japanese tsunami and Britain's royal wedding, says Jeremiah Johnston, the chief operating officer for Sedo, the world's largest domain marketplace and domain-parking service. Though Johnston says Sedo has blocked parking for domains with &quot;Bin Laden&quot; in them since 2006, he's observed enough domain rushes to get a sense of the online ecosystem Bin Laden's death has created. (Sedo deemed Bin Laden domains &quot;not commercially relevant&quot; but has allowed &quot;Osama&quot;- and &quot;Usama&quot;-named domains because of those names' prevalence in Arabic-speaking communities.) &quot;But my instinct is that it's going to get bigger. I think there's more potential, long-term,&nbsp; in a Bin Laden name than the Japanese tsunami,&quot; Johnston says. &quot;There's going to be a cottage industry in Bin Laden-related merchandise.&quot;</p>
<p>There are a few ways to make money by registering a domain name. The first is to set up a new business as quickly as possible and attract customers who are searching for the hot topic, as Harary did. You can also buy a domain in hopes of reselling it to someone who wants it at a drastically inflated price. Last, you can direct your URL to a page stuffed with advertisements and profit off all the eyeballs that reach your site accidentally, known as &quot;parking&quot; a domain. A random sampling of the Bin Laden domains suggests that most fall into the third category. This isn't surprising: A <a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1734201">study published last year</a> in the Association for Computing Machinery's flagship journal found that about a quarter of all &quot;.com&quot; and &quot;.net&quot; websites are such ads portals. (The authors based this estimate on a sample of more than 200,000 domains.) Their lifeblood is what's known as &quot;type-in traffic,&quot; when people looking for photographs of Bin Laden's body types &quot;osamaphotos.com&quot; into their browser location-bar instead of searching &quot;osama photos&quot; through a search engine.</p>
<p>People who park current-events-related domains are generally looking for &quot;quick cash,&quot; Sedo's Johnston says. Generally, a domain-parker will register hundreds of similar domain names at bulk prices around $7 per domain for a year at a time. After a year, they'll jettison the domains whose ads haven't covered registration costs. (Shiftier domain-parkers participate in what's known as &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting">domain tasting</a>,&quot; which takes advantage of the five-day grace period available for domain-registration refunds.)</p>
<p>&quot;Most of them are really ephemeral, stupid domain names,&quot; says Jacob Ruytenbeek, a California-based consultant who says he's taking the opposite strategy with <a href="http://binladenfilm.com/">binladenfilm.com</a>. He bought the domain, the first he says he's bought for pure speculation, about 10 minutes after he saw &quot;Bin Laden Killed&quot; appear on an MSNBC news ticker Sunday night. Someone had already registered binladenmovie.com (in April 2007, it turns out), &quot;but I was shocked that binladenfilm.com wasn't.&quot; He uploaded a basic WordPress blog, and seeded it with a few bare-bone entries, including a post announcing the domain was for sale. So far Ruytenbeek hasn't received any offers, but he is planning to reach out to major movie studios soon. &quot;I think the value of this domain name has not peaked,&quot; he says. &quot;It will peak as interest builds in a film.&quot;</p>
<p>Scores of domain speculators like Jacob have put their Bin Laden-related domains up for auction or sale on sites like eBay and Sedo, with asking prices Wednesday afternoon as high as $21 million, for the awkward, 1990s-sounding eOsamaBinLaden.com. (Some perspective: sex.com sold for a record $13 million in November.) Other sellers are asking $1 million (05-01-11.com), $100,000 (osamas72virgins.com), $10,000 (binladennews.com), all the way down to starting prices of 99 cents (osamabinraided.com), possibly in hopes that bidding pushes the cost above the registration price. </p>
<p>Despite, or perhaps because of, the deluge of domain registrations, domain resellers seem to be having a tough time. On eBay Wednesday afternoon, $29.99 appeared to be the highest actual bid (for dead-osama-photos.us) among auctions for Bin Laden-related domains. Brock Martin, a night-shift machine operator from Findlay, Ohio, who buys and sells domain names on the side, said he jumped onto his computer as soon as he saw a generic &quot;Breaking News&quot; flash across his television. As soon as it became clear Bin Laden had been killed, he started typing. &quot;Osamabinladendead—taken. Binladendead—taken,&quot; he recounts. &quot;First one I got was osamakilled.com.&quot;</p>
<p>Martin has about 130 domains in his portfolio, which he began stocking after Michael Jackson's death seemed to make instant millionaires of the &quot;domainer&quot; quickest to the draw. &quot;This could be bigger than that,&quot; Martin says of the Bin Laden domain rush. But, &quot;As far as I can tell, it seems that people haven't really paid much for them.&quot; Perhaps buyers are afraid of the potential negative repercussions of starting a Bin Laden-themed website, he speculates. Noticing the lack of interest, Martin has already dropped the asking price for his six eBay-listed domains from $50,000 apiece to prices ranging from $1,800 to $12,500. But he's accepting lower offers for consideration. &quot;If someone offered one-tenth the asking price, I'd probably take it.&quot; If Martin's domains aren't sold by the time he'd be forced to re-register next year, he says, he'll just let them expire.</p>Wed, 04 May 2011 22:54:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2011/05/osamabinraidedcom_going_once_going_twice_.htmlJeremy Singer-Vine2011-05-04T22:54:00ZThe flash market of Bin Laden-related URLs isn't making many people rich.TechnologyOsama-related Web sites are being registered by the hundreds.2293033Jeremy Singer-VineWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2293033falsefalsefalseOsama-related Web sites are being registered by the hundreds.Osama-related Web sites are being registered by the hundreds.An HTML for Numbershttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2011/02/an_html_for_numbers.html
<p> The Age of Data is just around the corner, right where it has been for years. As someone who spends a lot his time <a href="http://labs.slate.com/">creating visualizations</a>, I've been hoping for this day to come for a very long time. &quot;It used to be that you would get stories by chatting to people in bars,&quot; Internet godfather (and non-journalist) Tim Berners-Lee <a href="http://www.psfk.com/2010/12/the-future-of-journalism-data-analysis.html">declared last year</a>. &quot;But now it's also going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyze it.&quot; Don't buy it? This <a href="http://datajournalism.stanford.edu/">transfixing eight-part video series</a> from Knight Journalism fellow Geoff McGhee might change your mind. Data isn't just for nerds any more—it's beautiful, alluring, extraordinary.</p>
<p>It's also incredibly hard to work with. The problem with bringing data to journalism isn't convincing writers and editors that it's useful for telling stories; it's the toil required to get the numbers in a usable format. The data is already there, from federal sentencing figures and unemployment rates by county to minute-by-minute Twitter responses to the Black Eyed Peas' smoldering wreckage of a Super Bowl halftime show. The problem is that it all looks different. It is compiled by different people using different programs and represented in different formats. As a result, mashing up data isn't as simple as mashing together two balls of Silly Putty. It's more like trying to plug a bunch of American appliances into outlets in Tbilisi.</p>
<p>In hopes of bridging this data divide, Google is rolling out a tool called <a href="http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&amp;ctype=m&amp;strail=false&amp;nselm=s&amp;met_s=unemployment_rate&amp;hl=en&amp;dl=en#ctype=c&amp;strail=false&amp;nselm=s&amp;met_y=unem">Public Data Explorer</a>. While Data Explorer has been around for a while, it's now been extended to allow users to upload and visualize their own data sets. But that's not why Google's effort is important. If you want to make cool visualizations, IBM's <a href="http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/">Many Eyes</a> offers <a href="http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/page/Visualization_Options.html">more than a dozen different ways</a> to display information. (Google currently offers four pretty standard ones.) The exciting news here is that Google is pushing for the adoption of a specific format. Users must upload their data in two files, one for all the numbers and one that describes what those numbers represent. If this feature becomes popular, it will make it a whole lot easier for people and agencies to use one another's data. It's not quite a universal format, but it's a lot closer than anything we have today.</p>
<p>The beauty of the Web—in fact, the reason the Internet can function in the first place—is that it doesn't require intensive training to publish a page in a readable format. Sure, you might have to learn a few HTML tags—or pay an 11-year-old who knows HTML—but it's a simple language that's easy to pick up. There is no equivalent for data. There are plenty of standards for making data readable by a machine, but no single format that everyone can understand and agree on.</p>
<p>While plenty of people have tried to develop a data standard, none of them have been named Google. A promising site called <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2006/12/05/swivel-to-launch-this-week-communitize-your-data/">Swivel</a> tried to became a &quot;YouTube for data&quot; a few years ago, but <a href="http://eagereyes.org/criticism/the-rise-and-fall-of-swivel">don't go looking for it now</a>. One of Google's greatest powers is its ability to cajole Web developers into playing by the company's rules, in hopes of climbing in the rankings and generally staying in the demigod's good graces. For sure, there are well-developed languages, like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML">XML</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Json">JSON</a>, for organizing data in a way computers can understand. While these are great for representing data for a specific purpose, a search engine wouldn't know what to do with my code without extra information from me on what the numbers mean. This is where a standard format becomes essential.</p>
<p>To understand why I'm rooting for Google, consider this brief tale of woe. When I was trying to build a <a href="http://labs.slate.com/articles/slate-job-map-updated/">map of job-loss data</a> for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>, I started with the <a href="http://www.bls.gov/lau/">month-by-month, county-by-county figures</a> from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This data comes in huge text files with arcane codes—meaningless gibberish unless you have the software and the know-how to match those codes to the names of counties, which live in a different file. At the time, I did this in Excel with a cocktail of Byzantine macros, late nights, and emotional breakdowns.</p>
<p>I've since discovered better ways to crunch these figures, but I had to learn a lot of programming to get there. If the job data I wanted for my map had already been represented in Google's format, I would have saved days of work getting it into shape (even if I wanted to use my own software to visualize it instead one of the four display options that Google offers).</p>
<p>Even more compelling is the possibility that data could join the ranks of text, images, and video in Google search results. This happens in a very basic form now. If you Google &quot;<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+italy&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;aq=t&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a">population of Italy</a>,&quot; you see a simple graph of population over time at the top of the results page, which you can click for more detail. This is the exact same tool that's opening up to the public today. Imagine if Google's spiders, forever crawling the Web to index its contents, could smartly identify and sort data? Let's say I publish an article on <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2221553/">YouTube view counts</a> that includes proprietary data I collected for the piece. If it's formatted according to Google's standards, it might show up as a little bar graph when someone searches for &quot;YouTube views,&quot; even if my article itself isn't at the top of the results. (By the way, Public Data Explorer allows you to choose whether to share your figures—despite the name, your data won't be public if you don't want it to be.)</p>
<p>The<strong></strong>breadth and relative complexity of Google's format will become clearer over time, but it can already represent many common types of information. For example, it can account for hierarchical data—a set in which the number of jobs in King County, Wash., is represented as a subset of jobs in Washington, which is in turn a subset of jobs in the United States. (This is useful for things like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping">treemaps</a>.) It's also good for time-lapse data, allowing you to show change over time in animated charts and graphs. While Google's system will have to evolve to accommodate less-traditional visualizations like network diagrams, its relative simplicity is a good thing. In a format like <a href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/">RDF</a>, the author needs to add a ton of extra information to the source code to help computers figure out what's what. Google, by contrast, wants most of the burden to be on its shoulders. </p>
<p>Public Data Explorer is important because not many people care to read data in its raw form. A simple presentation tool—essentially, an HTML for numbers instead of words—might not be sexy, but it could do a lot to elevate data to the same importance as text in search results.<strong></strong>Then, fingers crossed, mashing it all up could end up being just like mashing together a couple of balls of putty.</p>
<p><em>Like </em><strong><em>Slate </em></strong><em>on </em> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/slate"><em>Facebook</em></a><em>. Follow us on </em> <a href="http://http/www.twitter.com/slate"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>.</em></p>Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:16:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2011/02/an_html_for_numbers.htmlChris Wilson2011-02-16T21:16:00ZIs Google's Public Data Explorer the first step toward a universal data format?TechnologyGoogle Public Data Explorer: Is it the first step toward a universal data format?2285354Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2285354falsefalsefalseGoogle Public Data Explorer: Is it the first step toward a universal data format?Google Public Data Explorer: Is it the first step toward a universal data format?Jesus of Wikipediahttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2011/01/jesus_of_wikipedia.html
<p> At 1:12 a.m. on March 3, 2001, Jimmy Wales created a page for Jesus on a three-month-old site called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus">Wikipedia</a>. &quot;Jesus Christ is a central figure in Christianity,&quot; he wrote. The site's co-founder followed with a petition to his fellow first-generation editors: &quot;I fear great controversy if this encyclopedia entry isn't written well, and so I think we should all plunge in and duke it out quickly.&quot; Four months later, a user called &quot;Hiram&quot; answered the call, changing &quot;a central figure&quot; to &quot;the central figure&quot; and writing a respectable four-paragraph summary of the biblical story of Jesus. &quot;Added some details. Not enough, I know,&quot; he noted in the comments to his edit.</p>
<p>Wikipedia turned 10 years old this week, and perhaps no entry better captures its chaotic ascendency than that of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus">Jesus Christ</a>. What follows is a brief history of Wikipedia Jesus—his test, trials, and the chaotic world into which he was born.</p>
<p>Jesus had a quiet adolescence, reared by well-behaved editors. Users fiddled with sentences and paragraphs, expanding on references and adding a broader accounting of his role in the Judaic religions. He was briefly promoted to the &quot;most central figure in Christianity,&quot; but was restored to mere centrality in the next edit. The &quot;Jews for Jesus&quot; made a brief appearance on his page in August of 2002 but were <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jesus&amp;oldid=6799595">removed</a> with a polite explanation as to why. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger occasionally ducked in to brush up little disputes.</p>
<p>Wikipedia Jesus was vandalized for the first time on Nov. 6, 2002, when an anonymous user <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jesus&amp;oldid=6799701">replaced the entire page</a> with the repeated phrase &quot;bla bla is all I hear.&quot; Jesus existed in such a state for five minutes before another user rescued him. In the new year, he got a photo. It was removed three days later. By his second birthday, he had a seven-chapter entry covering his teachings, roles in various denominations and other religions, and historical footprint. By this point, he was gathering disciples, with a small number of Wikipedians emerging as the primary scribes of Jesus' teachings and legacy. (Some made edits to the page six or seven times a day.) On Feb. 1, 2004, he met a robot, a new kind of Wikipedian who spruces up pages automatically, like a Roomba. He celebrated his 1,000<sup>th</sup> edit around his third birthday, unaware othat storm clouds were gathering on the horizon.</p>
<p>As Wikipedia's profile grew, Jesus attracted more unwanted attention. In 2004, someone named Lord Cornholio erased the page and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jesus&amp;oldid=6800606">linked it</a> to a now defunct site called &quot;tubgirl.&quot; Even when the page was safe from vandals, it read with considerably less admiration. &quot;Jesus Christ … is controversial figure about whom there are many points of view,&quot; declared <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jesus&amp;oldid=6800758">the entry's first sentence</a> in April 2004. Many <a></a> edits were now being struck down by Jesus's loyal defenders because they weren't &quot;NPOV&quot;-a Wikipedia term for &quot;neutral point-of-view.&quot;<a href="http://www.slate.com#Correct">*</a> There was a long series of back-and-forths about his sexuality. In November 2004, he was briefly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jesus&amp;oldid=7616262">accused of offering political advice</a> to newly re-elected George W. Bush but was quickly absolved. </p>
<p>The vandals only got worse. On Jan. 19, 2005, Wikipedia Jesus got a security detail; unregistered users were now forbidden to edit the page. As soon as the protection was lifted, the vandals came back. His followers began to develop a division of labor: Some were janitors, others grammarians, and a few monitored all legitimate contributions with a cautious eye. Either because of or in spite of their efforts, the page got branded with a disclaimer: &quot;The neutrality of this article is disputed,&quot; with clip art of an unbalanced scale. There was a tense dispute over the use of &quot;A.D.&quot; versus &quot;C.E.&quot; for dates.</p>
<p>By this point, Wikipedia had grown to an extent that Jesus needed a last name to distinguish himself from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_%28disambiguation%29">other people named Jesus</a>. In the summer of 2006, his security detail returned for good. This provided a degree of stability, and after a few months Wikipedia Jesus is suddenly a grown man. His page is 16,000 words long. Most edits improved on minor points; the bibliography is the fastest growing part of the page as more and more documentation is added, lest the angel of NPOV smite an addition. Robots are a common sight now, scrubbing links and renovating code.</p>
<p>Wales' kingdom has grown unimaginably since he created Wikipedia Jesus. More than 2.5 million entries <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaArt.PNG">have been written</a> since March 3, 2001, and many of the edits to Jesus are simply links to all of these new pages. In 2006, <a href="http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/articleinfo/index.php?article=Jesus&amp;lang=en&amp;wiki=wikipedia">nearly 7,000 edits were made</a> to Jesus' profile. In 2009 there are barely 1,000. Users will continue to polish his edges, but their work feels mostly done. Meanwhile, the vandals circle, waiting for the moment when that protection comes down.</p>
<p><em><strong>*Correction, <a></a> Jan. 17, 2011:</strong> The article originally </em><em>identified the Wikipedia term &quot;NPOV&quot; as &quot;non-neutral point-of-view.&quot; It is just &quot;neutral point of view.&quot; (<a href="http://www.slate.com#Return">Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>
<p><em>Like&nbsp;<strong>Slate&nbsp;</strong>on&nbsp;</em> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/slate"><em>Facebook</em></a><em>. Follow us on&nbsp;</em> <a href="http://www.twitter.com/slate"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>.</em></p>Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:27:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2011/01/jesus_of_wikipedia.htmlChris Wilson2011-01-14T22:27:00ZUsing Christ's page as a guide to the online encyclopedia's 10-year history.TechnologyWikipedia's 10th birthday, and what Jesus' page can tell us about it.2281294Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2281294falsefalsefalseWikipedia's 10th birthday, and what Jesus' page can tell us about it.Wikipedia's 10th birthday, and what Jesus' page can tell us about it.The Internet's Secret Back Doorhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2010/08/the_internets_secret_back_door.html
<p> The United Arab Emirates <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20012582-94.html">continues to wrestle</a> with Research in Motion over government access to BlackBerry messages, threatening to ban the company's services if it doesn't severely weaken the anti-snooping protections on its smartphones. But years before the RIM battle boiled over, other Western companies handed the country a far greater power: the capability to infiltrate the secure system used by most banking, mail, and financing sites, making the most protected data on the Web available to the prying eyes of the emirates' government-connected telecommunications giant.</p>
<p>To understand how this happened, you need to understand the way much of the Web's private traffic stays private. Whenever you're sending sensitive information online—say, your credit card number to Amazon or a message over Gmail—the content is encrypted before being sent and then decrypted by the Web site you sent it to. (Sites using this secure mode have URLs that start with &quot;https,&quot; and browsers add a padlock icon as well to demonstrate you're communicating securely.) Every vendor has its own rules for how to scramble information so that only it, the intended recipient, can decode it. If anyone intercepts the message along the way, it will appear to be a meaningless digital jumble.</p>
<p>Cryptographers are reasonably confident that the mathematics behind this method of encryption makes it unassailable by direct assault, even by the most well-funded intelligence agencies. But they have also long been aware of a potential weakness in its design: There's no way for your computer to know if the recipient is who they say they are. Because of this, cyber-criminals (or curious governments) can trick you by staging a &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack">man in the middle attack</a>,&quot; where the snoop acts as an uninvited mediator between you and the intended recipient. Your computer thinks it's contacting your bank when in fact it's contacting the snoop, using his own rules for encrypting information. He decodes it, copies your sensitive data, then re-encodes it according to the bank's rules and sends it along. He does the same thing for traffic coming from the bank to you. Both your bank and you would believe you were talking directly to each other with no one else listening.</p>
<p>To overcome this deficiency, the Web's security relies on the idea of &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority">certificate authorities</a>&quot;: organizations that independently verify the identity of the Web site you're communicating with and provide a digital confirmation that it's authentic. A certificate authority's digital endorsement decides whether your browser believes a site when it claims to be <a href="https://www.gmail.com/">GMail</a>, <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx">Microsoft</a>, or even the New York Times, which has a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/">secure version</a>. Middle men can't fake this authentication without getting a similar endorsement. These certificate authorities are supposed to conduct due diligence in ensuring that only the real Web site gets their stamps of approval.</p>
<p>Who are these certificate authorities? At the beginning of Web history, there were only a handful of companies, like Verisign, Equifax, and Thawte,&nbsp;that made near-monopoly profits from being the only providers trusted by Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. But over time, browsers have trusted more and more organizations to verify Web sites. Safari and Firefox now trust more than 60 separate certificate authorities by default.&nbsp; Microsoft's software trusts more than 100 private and government institutions.</p>
<p>Disturbingly, some of these trusted certificate authorities have decided to delegate their powers to yet more organizations, which aren't tracked or audited by browser companies. By <a href="https://www.eff.org/observatory"> scouring the Net for certificates</a>, security researchers have uncovered more than 600 groups who, through such delegation, are now also automatically trusted by most browsers, including the Department of Homeland Security, Google, and Ford Motors—and a UAE mobile phone company called Etisalat.</p>
<p>In 2005, a company called CyberTrust—which has since been purchased by Verizon— gave Etisalat, the government-connected mobile company in the UAE, the right to verify that a site is valid. Here's why this is trouble: Since browsers now automatically trust Etisalat to confirm a site's identity, the company has the potential ability to <a href="http://www.crypto.com/blog/spycerts/">fake a secure connection</a> to any site Etisalat subscribers might visit using a man-in-the-middle scheme.</p>
<p>Etisalat doesn't exactly have a clean record when it comes to privacy. Tech watchdogs have already caught it deliberately attempting to invade the privacy of its own users. In July 2009, Etisalat abruptly announced a software update on all its BlackBerry customers. Described as a &quot;network upgrade,&quot; the application in fact copied all messages written on the device to <a href="http://www.blackberrycool.com/2009/07/21/smobile-systems-release-complete-technical-analysis-of-etisalat-update/">two private Etisalat e-mail addresses</a>. Research in Motion distanced itself from this clumsy attempt at government spyware, clarifying that it was &quot;<a href="http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ataglance/security/regappremover.jsp">not a RIM-authorized software upgrade</a>&quot; and providing a counter-app to remove the program.</p>
<p>To date, no one has observed Etisalat fake a Web site to spy on an individual's encrypted traffic. But because of the proliferation and delegation of certificate authorities, Etisalat and hundreds of other groups have that capability. The good news about misusing the power of certificate authorities is that, like the BlackBerry upgrade, such attacks can quickly be uncovered and publicized, given enough vigilance and the <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/index.html">right</a> <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6415/">tools</a>. </p>
<p>A better solution is to clean up the certificate authority lists and revoke the rights of organizations who could abuse it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I used to work, recently published <a href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/open-letter-verizon">an open letter</a> to Verizon asking them to consider publicly revoking the certificate authority that the company granted Etisalat. But that still leaves the hundreds of other certificate authorities that could turn rogue and start spying on the Web's secure systems.</p>
<p>Ironically, RIM's enterprise BlackBerry encryption is one of the few secure Internet communication channels that doesn't depend on certificate authorities, which could be one of the reasons the UAE is so obsessed with cracking it. RIM's defense against the UAE's demands is that corporations and individuals expect the same level of privacy in their BlackBerry communications as they get from any other Internet service. &quot;Everything on the Internet is encrypted,&quot; CEO Michael Lazaridis <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704017904575409093226146722.html">told the <em>Wall Street Journal</em></a>, slightly inaccurately. &quot;This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can't deal with the Internet, they should shut it off.&quot; What's worrying is that the UAE may indeed have already &quot;dealt with&quot; the rest of the Internet—just not in the way that most of us would like.</p>
<p><em>Like <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Slate"><strong>Slate</strong> on Facebook</a>. Follow us <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Slate">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:56:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2010/08/the_internets_secret_back_door.htmlDanny O'Brien2010-08-27T18:56:00ZWeb users in the United Arab Emirates have more to worry about than having just their BlackBerries cracked.TechnologyWeb users in the United Arab Emirates have more to worry about than having just their BlackBerries cracked.2265204Danny O'BrienWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2265204falsefalsefalseWeb users in the United Arab Emirates have more to worry about than having just their BlackBerries cracked.Web users in the United Arab Emirates have more to worry about than having just their BlackBerries cracked.Etisalat TelecommunicationsThe Tweet Alternativehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2010/06/the_tweet_alternative.html
<p> The Gray Lady will no longer <em>tweet</em>. That's according to the <em>New York Times</em>' standards editor Phil Corbett, who is <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/new-york-times-bans-the-word-tweet">pleading</a> with writers to avoid using the word in their copy whenever possible, invoking the paper's disdain for &quot;colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon.&quot; There are <em>tweet </em> partisans: The Associated Press <a href="http://mashable.com/2010/06/02/ap-social-media-guidelines/">gave <em>tweet</em> its blessing</a> in the most recent edition of its style guide, and the American Dialect Society listed <em>tweet </em> as its &quot;<a href="http://www.americandialect.org/index.php/amerdial/2009_word_of_the_year_is_tweet_word_of_the_decade_is_google/">word of the year</a>&quot; for 2009 (though that label is less an honorific than a reflection of widespread use).</p>
<p>Still, the <em>New York Times </em>isn't alone in its discomfort. Many of us cringe when forced to use the cutesy word and its accompanying <a href="http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/Twitter_Dictionary_Guide.asp">word-jam nomenclature</a>: <em>twitterverse</em>, <em>tweeple</em>, <em>tweeting</em>, &nbsp;<em>tweetup</em>, <em>retweet</em>, <em>twitterati</em>, <em>detweet</em>, <em>dweet</em>. Perhaps it's the word's similarity to the irksome <em>twee </em>and its connotations that makes us loathe it so. Twitter isn't the only social-media powerhouse to abuse the English language: Facebook's recent transition to &quot;like&quot; has made it hard to express anger or sadness—surely the more than 12,000 people who have &quot;liked&quot; a <a href="http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20389492,00.html">People.com article</a> about Gary Coleman's death weren't actually pleased to hear about his demise.</p>
<p>But so far, we seem short on worthy alternatives to <em>tweet</em> and <em>like</em>. The <em>Times</em>' standards editor suggests replacing <em>tweet</em> with <em>chirp</em>. He also proposes the following &quot;deft, English alternatives&quot;:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you've established that Twitter is the medium, simply use &quot;say&quot; or &quot;write.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But what Corbett views as &quot;deft&quot; substitutes seem more clunky and evasive than graceful, more self-conscious write-around than superior diction. Surely there is a third way: words that can succinctly, cleverly, and uncloyingly capture the meaning of <em>tweet</em> without making their utterer wince. </p>
<p>So, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> readers, help us coin some new Twitter and Facebook terminology. What should a single Twitter message be called? How should we recommend fan pages, articles, videos, and other Web media to our friends on Facebook? What social-media verb, noun, or adjective do you most loathe, and which are you actually somewhat fond of? Let us know in the comments, or e-mail us at <a href="mailto:hatethetweet@gmail.com">hatethetweet@gmail.com</a>. We'll round up your thoughts and proposals in a follow-up article on <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> next week.</p>
<p><strong>Bonus challenge</strong>: Let's help out the <em>New York Times </em>writers who must now avoid the word <em>tweet</em>. What's the longest sentence a person could write that plausibly gets around using the word <em>tweet</em>? </p>
<p><em>Like <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Slate"><strong>Slate</strong> on Facebook</a>. Follow us <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Slate">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>.</em></p>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:28:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2010/06/the_tweet_alternative.htmlTorie Bosch2010-06-11T12:28:00ZHelp Slate find better words for tweet, like, and other social-media jargon.TechnologyHelp Slate find better words for tweet, like, and other social-media jargon.2256665Torie BoschWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2256665falsefalsefalseHelp Slate find better words for tweet, like, and other social-media jargon.Help Slate find better words for tweet, like, and other social-media jargon.Broadbanditshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2010/03/broadbandits.html
<p>Most of the buildings in Dupree, S.D., <a href="http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts?_event=Search&amp;geo_id=&amp;_geoContext=&amp;_street=&amp;_county=dupree&amp;_cityTown=dupree&amp;_state=04000US46&amp;_zip=&amp;_lang=en&amp;_sse=on&amp;pctxt=fph&amp;pgsl=010&amp;show_2003_tab=&amp;redirect=Y">population 434</a>, do not have street addresses. The volunteer fire department is listed at P.O. Box 461, and you have to dial seven digits to reach it since there's no 911 emergency line. Unsurprisingly, the Greater Dupree Metropolitan Area also lacks broadband Internet service. &quot;We're about 30 years behind the rest of the United States,&quot; says Mayor Don Howe. &quot;In some ways, that's good. It's a slower pace of life.&quot;</p>
<p>Not for long—if the Federal Communications Commission has anything to say about it. On Tuesday morning, the FCC unleashed its <a href="http://broadband.gov/download-plan/">376-page plan</a> for&nbsp; <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/16/AR2010031600008.html">overhauling the nation's Internet connections</a>, and it includes the goal of extending broadband access to the entire country. As part of the stimulus package, passed in early 2009, Congress ordered the FCC to come up with a plan to provide broadband service to regions with no access to it. According to the FCC,&nbsp;such regions are home to some 14 million people. (Another 79 million have access to it but can't afford it or don't want it.) </p>
<p>The plan, unveiled to a capacity crowd in an FCC hearing room, has been largely well-received. Who's against faster Internet service? (Even the normally mulish National Association of Broadcasters, who are nervous about losing their chunk of the spectrum, had <a href="http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/450315-Wharton_Broadcasters_Could_Work_With_FCC_on_Voluntary_Spectrum_Reclamation.php">tentative praise</a> for it.) As FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn <a href="http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-296890A1.pdf">put it</a>: &quot;If we sit back and do nothing, we will be supporting the development of a long-lasting underclass of those who do not have access to the most basic needs.&quot; But supporting faster Internet service isn't the same as supporting a federal subsidy for faster Internet service. </p>
<p>A <a href="http://broadband.gov/plan/3-current-state-of-the-ecosystem/#s3-3">map of broadband availability</a> by county closely resembles a <a href="http://www.census.gov/popest/gallery/maps/County-Density-08.html">population density map</a>, and for good reason: In areas where a few people live far apart, it's simply not profitable to install the various lines and routers that deliver the Internet to consumers.&nbsp; The FCC estimates that it would cost $24 billion to subsidize a ground-based network to all 14 million of these unconnecteds. This figure is a bit misleading, however, because the complex model of broadband adoption that the FCC built to estimate these costs produces a classic <a href="http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_02_13_a_murray.html">power-law curve</a>. Of that $24 billion, $10 billion would extended access to 96 percent of those without broadband access. That last 4 percent would cost $14 billion—about $56,000 per home. </p>
<p>The median family income in Dupree in 2000 was less than $21,000. Howe said he doubts many people would pay, say, $30 a month for high-speed Internet. Would they use it at a school or in a library? Possibly at school, he said. There is no library.</p>
<p>Before the federal government invests billions in extending high-speed Internet to such areas, it ought to make sure people want it—and are ready for it. A <a href="http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-296442A1.pdf">recent FCC survey</a> by John Horrigan, who's been studying broadband adoption patterns for years, found that the 79 million who resist getting broadband do so for the usual reasons: It's too expensive, they're not comfortable with computers, they're fearful of risks like identity theft, and so forth. (Only 14 percent said they use the Internet just at work and don't need it at home.) As one might guess, <a href="http://broadband.gov/plan/3-current-state-of-the-ecosystem/#s3-4">adoption rates are lowest</a> for older Americans, minorities, those with little education, and in rural areas.</p>
<p>This is part of the reason the FCC suggests outreach efforts that say, &quot;Hey, look at all the cool stuff you can do on the Internet!&quot;—it wants to encourage more holdouts to give broadband a try. There are also proposals to expand programs that currently subsidize telephone service for low-income and rural regions to include broadband Internet service. The argument, which makes sense, is that computer and online literacy are essential skills for the 21<sup>st</sup> century, so&nbsp;programs should&nbsp;focus on regions where the infrastructure is already in place and reach out to people who simply haven't taken advantage of it yet.</p>
<p>The model that the FCC used for its estimates of population and cost, which will be detailed in a forthcoming white paper, took into account the demographics of uncovered areas in order to predict the return on investment for building out the network. In regions where a significant number of people are likely to adopt broadband—that is, where it isn't too unprofitable to wire them up—a modest federal subsidy is a sensible solution. (The FCC claims its plan is budget neutral since it also proposes freeing up and auctioning off 500 megahertz of the spectrum.) But there is no company in America—at least no company that wanted to remain solvent—willing to pay scores of thousands of dollars per household to get broadband to the remotest parts of the country. It would probably be cheaper to buy each household its very own <a href="http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question606.htm">satellite connection</a>. </p>
<p>A major focus of the FCC's broadband plan is on the development of <a href="http://gigaom.com/2008/08/13/countdown-to-4g-whos-doing-what-when/">4G networks</a>, which promise powerful wireless broadband to computers and mobile devices well beyond that which the increasingly ubiquitous 3G can provide. America's hard-to-reach areas are ideal testing grounds for the emerging technologies that promise to free us all from coaxial cables. Government officials and researchers should continue to study how best to introduce broadband access to underdeveloped regions. Doing so may require a blunt acknowledgement that providing broadband access is just part of encouraging digital literacy, and that investments should be prioritized to regions where the most people can benefit. No one wants to build the Fiber Optics Line to Nowhere.</p>
<p><em>Become a fan of <a href="http://www.facebook.com/Slate"><strong>Slate</strong> on Facebook</a>. Follow us on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Slate">Twitter</a>.</em></p>Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:04:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2010/03/broadbandits.htmlChris Wilson2010-03-17T02:04:00ZWhat's wrong with the FCC's plan to bring high-speed Internet access to rural America.TechnologyWhat's wrong with the FCC's plan to bring high-speed Internet access to rural America.2248074Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2248074falsefalsefalseWhat's wrong with the FCC's plan to bring high-speed Internet access to rural America.What's wrong with the FCC's plan to bring high-speed Internet access to rural America.Your Gullible Friend Has Sent You a Photo!http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/09/your_gullible_friend_has_sent_you_a_photo.html
<p> Until last weekend, I had never heard of WeGame.com, the go-to source for videos of video games. Then, on Sunday, I got an e-mail from a casual acquaintance with the subject line &quot;[casual acquaintance] has sent you a photo!&quot; Naturally, I clicked the link, which took me to WeGame. The site invited me to see this photo—just as soon as I entered my e-mail password, which it promised not to remember.</p>
<p>The site's tactic is dirty and obvious: When you give it your login info, it mines all the contacts from your account and fires off an identical e-mail to all of them with your name in the subject line. I got several more WeGame messages on both my Gmail and work accounts from infrequent contacts, like the friend of an ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend. There's nothing truly evil going on here—it appears to just be an overzealous publicity campaign on WeGame's part. This episode of &quot;social spamming,&quot; however, does reveal a ripe opportunity for more pernicious spammers to get access to your accounts and cause all sorts of trouble.</p>
<p>There are times when it's useful to allow a Web site to peek at your contacts list. Both Facebook and Twitter offer to search your e-mail to find friends' profiles or user names. WeGame, which is a serious project that <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/12/wegames-19-year-old-founder-raises-3-million-financing/">raised $3 million</a> when it launched, has as much right as anyone to market itself to users' friends via e-mail. The difference is that WeGame encourages you actually to <em>send mail</em> to all your contacts, firing out misleading messages if you click &quot;yes&quot; too many times without reading carefully. Every time I logged in, the photo my friend allegedly wanted to share was the same: a <a href="http://www.wegame.com/view/Mario_and_Luigi_Costumes/">picture of two people dressed as the Mario Bros</a>. </p>
<p>I signed up on WeGame with a dummy account on Monday morning to see exactly how easy it is to spam all your friends accidentally. Once I went through the sign-up process, I got to a pop-up that asked me to &quot;confirm [my] e-mail invites.&quot; All of the contacts in my dummy account's address book were selected. In order to avoid spamming everyone, I had to hit cancel and start unchecking names. This actually represents progress for the site. Armin Rosen, a Columbia University senior who <a href="http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2009/09/20/spammed">fell for the WeGame scheme</a>, tells me that he &quot;didn't even see the list of e-mails&quot; he was about to send when he signed up. (In response to my questions about his site's publicity strategies, WeGame founder Jared Kim pleaded ignorance, telling me only that his &quot;team makes pretty rapid changes&quot; to WeGame's functionality.)</p>
<p>I can't remember the last time I saw any piece of old-school spam that looked believable. The spelling and grammar are often hopelessly mangled, and we've all learned not to open weird attachments or send strangers our bank account information. But notes like the one from WeGame are a new breed. Because we are so accustomed to interacting with friends over social networking sites, getting an e-mail about a photo link doesn't seem strange. Sites that pose as social networks are the new spammers, and they're a lot harder to sniff out than the traditional penis enlargement and fake Rolex watch crowd.</p>
<p>Consider the <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/02/24/viddyho-attack-spreads-through-chat-sessions/">case of ViddyHo.com</a>. The site, which launched in February, promised you a video if you logged in through MSN Messenger, AIM, or Gmail, among other sites. This isn't such a strange request. <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php">Facebook Connect</a> allows other Web purveyors to use Facebook profiles as a form of identification, and your Gmail password is your ticket to all of Google's tools and gadgets. ViddyHo wasn't on the level, though, and people who fell for the trick paid the price. If you handed over your Gmail username and password, the site proceeded to GChat all of your friends to spread the good news about ViddyHo. Not only were victims hacked; all of their friends knew they were gullible.</p>
<p>The damage caused by ViddyHo, as with WeGame, appears limited to embarrassment. Hoan Ton-That, the site's San Francisco-based creator, told me in April that he didn't mean to auto-invite people's entire address books, though the fact that he <a href="http://gawker.com/5167506/anarcho+transexual-hacker-returns-with-new-scam-site">has a new site with similar ambitions</a> is not heartening. But there's nothing preventing the next ViddyHo from doing more damage, logging passwords and contacts for more sinister purposes.</p>
<p>Like any good scam, social spam exploits our trust—the belief that our friends wouldn't invite us to join a site with bad intentions. Versions of this trick have been around since the height of AOL Instant Messenger's dominance, when I would occasionally get IMs from friends with purported links to articles about Osama Bin Laden's capture. (I clicked on that one.) But the rise of social networking has made these scams even more convincing. I have a feeling most of the victims of the WeGame e-mails were more absent-minded than gullible. We decide we're going to register for some new site and then go into autopilot, typing in whatever we're asked for in the fields. After all, we've done it a thousand times before without incident. (One victim at Wesleyan claims to have been on the phone while absently clicking through the motions and ended up <a href="http://wesleyanargus.com/2009/09/15/wegame-com-the-aftermath/">infecting her best friend's mother</a>.)</p>
<p>It's easy to imagine how social spam could wreak real havoc. Imagine a site—vouched for in a friend's e-mail message, naturally—that asks users to provide their e-mail address as a login, then prompts them to set up a password. It would then be elementary for the wicked Web site to check whether this e-mail/password combo opens the user's Webmail account. Considering how often people use the same password for all of their Web transactions, I bet that simple scheme would work a lot of the time. Once the Webmail has been cracked, the wicked Web site could send invitations to everyone in the contact list—and plunder the inbox for valuable goodies like bank account information or Social Security numbers.</p>
<p>If WeGame and its ilk continue to proliferate, it may fall to the Webmail clients to place extra protections on how outside sites can mine contacts. &quot;We don't approve of third-party sites handling their users' information in this way,&quot; a Google spokesperson told me, adding that &quot;in some cases we may take more proactive measures to identify and block the spam.&quot;</p>
<p>WeGame doesn't actually send mail from users' Gmail accounts—it just sends all your contacts e-mail with your name in the subject line. On account of that, the best Google could have done immediately would have been to block e-mail that came from WeGame. In the meantime, a quick, finger-wagging PSA: The rise of social spam is yet another reason to practice safe surfing. Think twice whenever a site asks for your Webmail password. And for the millionth time, don't use the same password for everything.</p>Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:12:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/09/your_gullible_friend_has_sent_you_a_photo.htmlChris Wilson2009-09-23T15:12:00ZThe dangers of social spam.TechnologyThe dangers of social spam.2229299Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2229299falsefalsefalseThe dangers of social spam.The dangers of social spam.Be Like Gmailhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/09/be_like_gmail.html
<p> On Tuesday, Facebook launched <a href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=133647397130">Prototypes</a>, a service that lets users test out new tools and features before they become fixtures on the site. The <a href="http://www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php#/apps/directory.php?app_type=6">first small batch</a> offers nothing revolutionary: a search feature for photo tags, a way to better sync events with Outlook and other programs, and an app to let Mac users monitor their profiles from their desktop. But for a site with a history of unveiling huge makeovers with little notice—like the March 2009 redesign that got a <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/19/facebook-polls-users-on-redesign-94-hate-it/">5 percent approval rating</a> its first week—this is good news. Using Facebookers as beta testers is a great PR move and a positive sign for the future of the social networking site. By enlisting a huge, devoted focus group, Facebook will likely ensure that nothing that nine out of 10 users hate will become a part of the site's permanent design.</p>
<p>If Facebook wants assurance that this model will work, it need only look to Gmail. For more than a year, Google has been crafting its webmail service by observing what its users do and don't want. Here's how it works: When a Google developer cooks up a new gizmo, the team will debut it in Gmail Labs, a buffet where individual users can pick and choose what to add to their accounts. (To get to Labs, sign in and click on the Settings page to find the bazaar of optional features.) There are currently 52 optional features in Labs. Some apps offer aesthetic improvements (adding <a href="http://www.iamatechie.com/pictures-in-gmail-chat/">thumbnail images to the chat window</a> or <a href="http://mashable.com/2009/08/20/gmail-signature-tips/">randomizing the quote</a> at the end of your messages), while others are more functional (<a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-youtube-picasa-flickr-and.html">previewing YouTube videos</a> in the body of an e-mail). And then there is the save-you-from-yourself genre, with gems like the <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-in-labs-handy-intern-tweaks.html">forgotten attachment detector</a> and <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html">Mail Goggles</a>, a program that asks you to solve math problems before sending e-mail during hours when you're likely to be drunk.</p>
<p>Rather than saddling users with a variety of new, untested gewgaws all at once—both Facebook circa March 2009 and Microsoft Office 2007 spring to mind—Google developers monitor how many users add each Labs project and how often they use them. Thus far, <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/tasks-graduates-from-gmail-labs.html">Tasks</a>, Gmail's &quot;to do&quot; list, is the only app that has graduated to the version of Gmail that everyone sees. Several other add-ons—<a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-undo-send.html">Undo Send</a>, which gives you a few seconds to cancel an outgoing e-mail; <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-youtube-picasa-flickr-and.html">in-message previews</a> of videos, pictures, and Yelp reviews; and <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-in-labs-offline-gmail.html">offline access</a>—are extremely popular and among the most likely to graduate to Gmail proper in the foreseeable future.</p>
<p>By offering new toys to early adopters, Google conscripts its most active users to serve as guinea pigs. Even if some Labs projects are unlikely to graduate to prime time—it's hard to imagine Mail Goggles making the cut—testing them out gives developers a sense of how people want to use their Gmail accounts. Do they want a battery of options for restricting bad behavior, or do they just want to be left alone? Is there a burning desire to integrate GPS location into messages? These are the kind of questions that can be answered only in a huge, real-world testing environment.</p>
<p>Firefox pioneered this pick-and-choose-your-features approach with its <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/">add-ons</a>, which allow any developer to program auxiliary features into the browser. (eBay fanatics, for example, can <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5202">install an add-on</a> that tracks their bids in a side panel.) Mike Beltzner, Firefox's product director, says that about 30 percent of users install <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1/cat:all?sort=popular">some sort of add-on</a>, a rate he says is more than sufficient to get a sense for what people want from the software. Many now-standard features, like the ability to drag and drop tabs or to restore tabs after a crash, were born from innovative, third-party-written add-ons that Mozilla developers happened to notice. Unlike with Gmail, outside developers can write programs that work in Firefox. The downside of this is that Mozilla's in-house programmers often have to rework the code of an add-on to optimize it for the browser. But there's also an overwhelming positive: Setting more developers loose means more and better add-ons will get written.</p>
<p>It's about time that Labs-like features proliferate across the Web. Flickr, for example, could offer more customization of how photos are stored and presented. Online blogging platforms could allow more freedom for users to write and share gadgets. It's Facebook, however, that stands to benefit most from adopting an add-on philosophy. The social networking behemoth rivals Gmail in its centrality to our social lives. That means its users are hypersensitive to change—and more likely to experiment with new features that make Facebook more fun or effective. Legions of Facebookers already add applications like <a href="http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=10979261223">Mafia Wars</a>, FarmVille, or any of the zillions of quizzes available. If Facebook offers add-ons that improve the site's user experience, millions will jump at the chance to test them out.</p>
<p>Like with Gmail, the first round of Facebook's prototypes were developed in-house. The initial run of add-ons will thus have access to the site's underlying architecture and theoretically give users the ability to tweak Facebook's form and function. Maybe one application could display a little ticker of how much time each of my friends waste on Facebook quizzes; another could tint people's profile pictures red or blue according to their political affiliation. (To be clear, I'm talking about changing only what individual users see when they log in to Facebook, not the public look and feel of an individual's page. No one wants to give people the chance to build MySpace-style pages that assault you with MIDIs and jarringly tessellated wallpaper.)</p>
<p>Facebook spokeswoman Meredith Chin says the company wants to use Prototypes to study the behavior of its users, not just figure out which features are popular and which aren't. Hopefully this is a signal that Zuckerberg and Co. finally get it.&nbsp;As Facebook was preparing its redesign last spring, it might have first tested it as an option in Prototypes. After a few months, Facebook could see how the new design fared: Did users quickly uninstall it, or did they adopt it and never look back? Even more so than Gmail, Facebook has to be all things to all types of people. It would be useful if it figured out what all types of people actually want.</p>Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:31:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/09/be_like_gmail.htmlChris Wilson2009-09-16T17:31:00ZWhat Facebook and other Internet companies can learn from Google's webmail service.TechnologyWhat Facebook can learn from Gmail.2228451Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2228451falsefalsefalseWhat Facebook can learn from Gmail.What Facebook can learn from Gmail.Masters of the Wikiversehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/09/masters_of_the_wikiverse.html
<p> The council of elders that runs Wikipedia confirmed last week that, sometime soon, the unwashed masses will no longer be able to directly edit the profiles of famous living people. The proposed policy, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/internet/25wikipedia.html?_r=1">first reported</a> by the <em>New York Times</em> and later <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/26/a-quick-update-on-flagged-revisions/">clarified</a> by the Wikimedia Foundation, would require an ordained Wikipedia editor to approve changes before they become visible. This was widely reported as a stress fracture in Wikipedia's sacred anyone-can-edit architecture. <em>Fast Company</em> <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/wikipedia-grows-limits-edits-biographies">painted it</a> as Wikipedia's coming of age. A commenter on Slashdot <a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1346195&amp;cid=29184799">compared the move</a> to &quot;Lenin abolishing free elections.&quot;</p>
<p>Cooler heads were <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedias_flagged_revisions_whats_really_going_on.php">quick to cast the policy</a> as a fairly minor revision to Wikipedia's existing defense mechanisms. Currently, anyone can edit most pages without even signing up for a username, in which case the IP address is logged with the changes. Pages that are prone to vandalism, like those for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus">Jesus</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush">George W. Bush</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iCarly_episodes">episodes of <em>iCarly</em></a>, are protected so that greener users can't edit them. Still, the bar for access is not terribly high. To edit a protected page, you need to register a username, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels#Autoconfirmed_users">wait four days, and make at least 10 edits</a> to unprotected pages. Wikipedia's new proposed policy, called &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions#Flagged_protection">flagged protection</a>,&quot; gets rid of this detox period and requires that unregistered users have their edits approved by a more seasoned Wikipedian. (The Wikimedia Foundation <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reviewers">hasn't clearly defined</a> how you get to be a reviewer who can approve edits.) </p>
<p>Wikipedia brass says that the site's new rules will apply only to pages for high-profile living people who are most likely to be harmed by misinformation. Unapproved edits will still be visible for users who sign in, though most Wikipedia browsers probably won't take that step.</p>
<p>No matter how you spin this new policy, there's no getting around that it gives more power and control to a small group of people. But if this were a big problem, Wikipedia would have flopped a long time ago. As I've argued before, the encyclopedia's success is largely due to <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2184487/">the devoted efforts of a small number of obsessive editors</a>, many of whom are quick to undo the work of trespassing newcomers. Rather than a signal Wikipedia's coming of age or a shift away from democracy, these new rules merely formalize, for certain pages, what's already happening on the site. </p>
<p>Take, for example, the <a href="http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2009/08/part-2-more-details-of-changing-editor.html">extensive analysis of the Wikipedia ecosystem</a> by Ed Chi and his colleagues at the Palo Alto Research Center. About half of all edits, they found, come from users who have made at least 100 changes to the site, and 20 percent of edits come from those who have made 1,000 or more changes. (<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_AupR31ucai4/SnziZBddnaI/AAAAAAAAAes/ajIoJb8HZWc/s1600-h/Figure9-PercentEditsByClass_NoRobotNoVandal.png">See the graph here</a>.) On the other end, Chi and company found that by the end of 2008, first-time users had a 25 percent chance of having their change to Wikipedia undone by someone else. (That doesn't include changes that are obvious vandalism.) That figure dropped to around 15 percent for the user's next eight edits. Users who've made more than 100 edits, meanwhile, have their fixes undone 1 percent of the time.</p>
<p>This wiki-oligarchy presents its own sort of dangers. The movers and shakers of Wikipedia are largely hidden from public view and unaccountable for editorial decisions. It is fairly easy for one person to establish sovereignty over a less-trafficked page through sheer persistence and a solid command of the site's Byzantine rules for resolving disputes. For example, consider the curious case of sports writer Rick Reilly's affinity for tooth jokes, which my colleague <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2205759/">Josh Levin chronicled last December</a>. Levin's story made it into&nbsp; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Reilly">Reilly's Wikipedia page</a>, where it was removed by a user who <a href="http://deadspin.com/5340957/deadspin-i+team-who-is-rick-reillys-virtual-bodyguard">turned out to be Reilly's PR representative</a>. The page's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rick_Reilly&amp;action=history">edit history</a> tells the rest of the story: Someone reinserted a reference to the tooth article, someone else removed it again, someone else added it back, and finally a user named Dayewalker, who has made <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&amp;limit=500&amp;target=Dayewalker">well more than 1,000 edits</a> on Wikipedia, weighed in: &quot;[H]umorous personal analysis of his style from a dental perspective is undue, and unsuitable for an encyclopedia. Please discuss on talk page and try and gain consensus.&quot; No one took up the fight, and Reilly's page remains free of Levin's critique.</p>
<p>Wikipedia is surely full of these little omissions, some of which have a lot more teeth than Rick Reilly's taste in figurative language. The hegemony of the devoted guardians of Wikipedia, the vast majority of whom have the best of intentions, is the price we pay for a site with such breadth and startling accuracy. Wikipedia isn't the Web's largest, most popular reference work because it adheres to the ideals of Web 2.0. It's become so pervasive because it's free, turns up <a href="http://www.thegooglecache.com/white-hat-seo/966-of-wikipedia-pages-rank-in-googles-top-10/">high in Google searches</a>, is easy to parse, has entries on just about everything, and, most importantly, is almost always right. (Where else can you turn for a convenient list of which characters get killed in every episode of <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001C3O6R2?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B001C3O6R2">The Sopranos</a></em>?) As long as this remains true, people will continue reading it.</p>
<p>While it's not quite right to say that the move to flagged revisions is a sign that Wikipedia is coming of age, it is true that the encyclopedia is maturing. At this point, the site is no longer growing at exponential rates. The PARC research team found that edits to the site have plateaued in the last 18 months, having <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_AupR31ucai4/SmfKIhW8UTI/AAAAAAAAAeU/LtWgtV-DloE/s1600-h/Figure3-TotalEdits_Reverts_monthly.png">peaked around January 2007</a>. While Wikipedia is certainly still growing, it appears that a larger percentage of the work is devoted to maintaining its current quality—something the flagged revision policy aims to make easier.</p>
<p>My guess is that you wouldn't notice the difference in Wikipedia even if the site restricts editing on a huge number of pages. There would be fewer embarrassing or harmful wiki-scandals, like when the site <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefing/2009/01/kennedy_the_latest_victim_of_w.html">briefly reported</a> on the day of President Obama's inauguration that Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had both died. (Both <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/inauguration-watch/2009/01/byrd_kennedy_leave_luncheon_fo.html">had health problems that day</a> but survived.) Sure, the site would lose a little responsiveness, though probably not much. Stats from the German Wikipedia, where this policy is already widely in place, suggest that most edits are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Voice_of_All/FR_stats">approved or denied quickly</a>, with a <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Markierungsstatistik&amp;uselang=en">median lag of about six-and-a-half hours</a>. Covering breaking news has never been Wikipedia's strong suit, anyway. That's why we have newspapers—for now.</p>Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:02:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/09/masters_of_the_wikiverse.htmlChris Wilson2009-09-02T16:02:00ZWikipedia's new editing policy isn't the end of the encyclopedia's democratic age. It's business as usual.TechnologyWikipedia's new editing policy isn't the end of the encyclopedia's democratic age.2227002Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2227002falsefalsefalseWikipedia's new editing policy isn't the end of the encyclopedia's democratic age.Wikipedia's new editing policy isn't the end of the encyclopedia's democratic age.No, You Can't Have My Social Security Numberhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/07/no_you_cant_have_my_social_security_number.html
<p> In a paper published last week, two Carnegie Mellon professors unveiled a method for <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/privacy/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218400854">cracking the code of Social Security numbers</a>. Given a person's birth date and the state where&nbsp;he or she was born along with public records of deceased people born around the same time, the researchers wrote an algorithm that predicted a person's SSN with startling accuracy. The biggest question raised by their paper isn't how our country came to rely on such an insecure identification system. The mystery is how it took so long for anyone to break such a ridiculously elementary system.</p>
<p>Social Security numbers were never designed to be secure. When SSNs came into existence 75 years ago, they had one and only one purpose: to keep track of contributions to the federal pension system. When Congress <a href="http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&amp;doc=68">established the program</a> in 1935, it started issuing cards with unique nine-digit numbers. The numbers were derived using a simple formula. The first three digits, called the &quot;area number,&quot; refer to the state where the card was issued. The fourth and fifth digits, the &quot;group number,&quot; are assigned in a predetermined order to divide the applicants into arbitrary groups. The last four digits, the &quot;serial number,&quot; are assigned sequentially, from 0001 to 9999 in each group. </p>
<p>Ten years after the SSN debuted, the feds added a clarification to the card in capital letters: &quot;FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES—NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION.&quot; By that point, it was already too late. Three years earlier, President Franklin Roosevelt had issued an <a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/privacy/files/EO_9397.pdf">executive order</a> allowing other federal agencies to use SSNs rather than launch their own systems. Within 20 years, the IRS, the Civil Service Commission, and the military were all using the numbers to identify people.</p>
<p>Social Security numbers haven't evolved much since those early days, but the techniques for exploiting them have. The Social Security Administration's Web site is happy to tell you <a href="http://www.ssa.gov/employer/stateweb.htm">which three-digit codes belong to which states</a> and in <a href="http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html">what order the group numbers are assigned</a>. The Carnegie Mellon researchers simply determined that if you know when and where a person was born—info that many of us readily supply on Facebook—you can narrow down her possible Social Security number to a fairly small range. (Studying existing government records, like the list of dead people's SSNs in the <a href="http://www.ssdmf.com/FolderID/1/SessionID/%7B4EA13F06-1E85-45C0-A4CE-FF78D146B1A6%7D/PageVars/Library/InfoManage/Guide.htm">Death Master File</a>, gave the researchers additional clues about when exactly specific states assigned specific numbers.) The system works particularly well for people born in small states, which have only a few possible area numbers. (For example, Wyoming natives are very likely to have Social Security numbers that start with 520.) The odds of guessing someone's number on the dot are still low—about 1 percent on average for more recent births, but up to 10 percent in small states. Even the lower figures, however, are plenty large enough to steal a lot of real identities if you use a small network of computers to try out lots of possibilities.</p>
<p>Now that SSNs are used on our driver's licenses, tax returns, and bank statements, we have the worst of all possible worlds: Numbers that were never intended to be secure are being used to secure our most-valuable information. Because many companies also use Social Security numbers as a password to get into your account, swiping the number from a license or a student ID card gives a person all sorts of access to your life.</p>
<p>One reason that Social Security numbers are so fouled up is that they're used as both identifiers—a way to keep track of which Joseph Smith you are—and as authenticators—a way for your cell phone carrier to verify that you are, in fact, Joseph Smith when you call to change your plan. Alessandro Acquisti, the lead author on the recent SSN-cracking paper, makes an analogy to phone numbers. Your number, which you're generally comfortable sharing with friends and colleagues, is a way of identifying you. The PIN number you punch in when you dial in to your voice mail is a way of authenticating that you're the owner of that number. No rational person, of course, would choose a PIN number that's the same as their phone number. But that's the way Social Security numbers work.</p>
<p>So what should we do to fix this?</p>
<p>One avenue would be to replace Social Security numbers with national IDs that are much harder to crack. (Many European countries have some form of national identification number.) An ideal system would have no obvious formula based on place or date of birth. While there are plenty of ways to increase security—for example, having an authentication number that's separate from your SSN, the way many credit cards now do—most people will tell you this isn't a good solution. Any system is likely to be cracked if the incentive is high enough, and an official national ID would potentially be a single point of failure if someone gets a copy of your number. And as groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center <a href="http://epic.org/privacy/id-cards/">frequently point out</a>, the public tends to oppose the idea of a national ID, making the prospect of such a system unlikely.</p>
<p>The simplest way to improve upon SSNs would be to diversify the way we identify ourselves. If we started using different ID numbers for different things, you wouldn't be able to take out a line of credit in my name if you stole my driver's license. Creating a bunch of unique IDs, though, leads to a contradiction between two sacred American rights: the Right to Privacy and the Right To Not Having To Remember 100 Different Numbers. The harder it is for people to manage their information, the less likely they are to log in to secure systems—bad for e-commerce—and the more likely they are to do things like write their security code on a Post-it note stuck to their computer monitor. </p>
<p>That's a good start, but the better SSN solutions are technical. Cryptologists long ago developed efficient ways to encode information such that only the intended recipient can decode them, a system known as <a href="http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/public_key_cryptography.html">public key encryption</a>. Many e-commerce transactions work this way, with the browser and the vendor exchanging &quot;certificates&quot; to prove their authenticity to the other. There is, admittedly, no simple way to adapt this system for human interactions in which you're reading your number to an offshore customer service representative.<strong></strong>Some studies, like <a href="http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1070001&amp;blobtype=pdf">this one</a>, have examined how to protect personal IDs in places like health care databases, but there is not yet a clear solution that uses this approach in a variety of contexts. In the foreseeable future, the best solution is the same one that worked in 1935: Use Social Security numbers for Social Security, and use different numbers for other things. And, for the millionth time, don't stick a Post-it on your monitor.</p>Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:08:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/07/no_you_cant_have_my_social_security_number.htmlChris Wilson2009-07-14T22:08:00ZWhy using SSNs for identification is risky and stupid.TechnologyWhy using Social Security numbers for identification is risky and stupid.2222882Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2222882falsefalsefalseWhy using Social Security numbers for identification is risky and stupid.Why using Social Security numbers for identification is risky and stupid.Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/07/will_my_video_get_1_million_views_on_youtube.html
<p>&quot;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM">Charlie Bit Me</a>,&quot; the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/browse?t=a&amp;p=1&amp;s=mp&amp;c=0&amp;l=">fourth most-viewed YouTube clip</a> of all time, is a viral video in the truest sense of the word. In May 2007, the father of two British tykes uploaded a home video he wanted to share with the kids' godfather in Colorado and a few American colleagues. After three months, only a few dozen people had seen the video, and he considered taking it off the site. Then, something strange happened: On Aug. 24, 2007, the video was viewed 25 times in California. Three days later, that number was up to 79, with a dozen more coming in from Washington, Texas, and Wisconsin. The number of daily views doubled roughly every week as &quot;Charlie Bit Me&quot; spread around the country and through Europe. On Nov. 5, a couple of guys in Canada <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCuhTppsCXM">filmed a frame-by-frame remake</a>. Two weeks later, CollegeHumor.com <a href="http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1798452">linked to the video</a>, and by January it was on <em>The Ellen DeGeneres Show</em>. A year and a half later, it's been watched 104 million times.</p>
<p>This is the great promise of YouTube: Your video can soar in popularity through sheer word-of mouth—or rather, click-of-mouth—until eventually people are <a href="http://shop.cafepress.com/charlie-bit-me?utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_source=google&amp;utm_campaign=seo--seo+-+t-shirts+-+us&amp;utm_term=charlie+bit+me+t+shirt&amp;utm_content=search-b&amp;cmp=knc--g--us--seo--tshirts--b--charlie_bit_me">making T-shirts</a> about it. No one ever said this was going to happen for everyone. So, what are your chances of achieving YouTube stardom? I crunched the numbers to find out what percentage of YouTube videos hit it big, cracking even 10,000 or 100,000 views. The results: You might have better odds playing the lottery than of becoming a viral video sensation.</p>
<p>On Friday, May 22, I used Web-crawling software to capture the URLs of more than 10,000 YouTube videos as soon as they were uploaded. Over the next month, I checked in regularly to see how many views each video had gotten. After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views—that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That's the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.</p>
<p>You can see the day-by-day stats in the box below. You can download the raw data <a href="http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/123097/2210695/2220370/Slate_YouTube_Study.xls">here</a> (Excel).</p>
<p>Out of my original litter, the only entry to break 100,000 views was a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izmcmm3QFeg">music video</a> from a German house/disco DJ named Michael Mind. I reran the experiment a couple of days later with a new batch of URLs and snared two videos that eventually became six-digit stars. One features a soccer mascot—I think it's a bumblebee—inadvertently <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2AOimsK5m0">smacking a player in the face</a>. Another shows VH1 personality Brooke Hogan's new single, &quot;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVT3ST0EAo8">Hey Yo!</a>&quot;</p>
<p> All in all, the results from my second experiment were almost identical to the first, with 66 percent of videos getting 50 or fewer views. These figures are somewhat lower than those from a similar study conducted by the British company Rubber Republic in January 2008. Rubber Republic's <a href="http://www.viralmanager.com/strategy/research_documents/how-many-you-tube-views-in-first-month.pdf">examination</a> (PDF) found that 10 percent of videos broke the 1,000-view ceiling, while 1 percent got an inconceivable 500,000 views. (Mouse over the dot to compare <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s data with Rubber Republic's.) &nbsp;</p>
<p>Why are my data so different? A developer for Rubber Republic told me the company selected videos at random from a feed of newly added material. My best guess for the decline in odds is that, in the 18 months between the two experiments, the number of total videos uploaded has grown much faster than the audience of people willing to watch them. A YouTube spokesman confirms that the amount of content uploaded to the site has grown continually—it's now up to about 20 hours of footage a minute from 15 hours at the beginning of 2009. (The company also says it does not collect data on how many videos get more than 10,000 or 100,000 views.)</p>
<p>So, what are we to make of these numbers? First, getting even 10,000 views is an impressive feat, particularly if momentum builds organically, like it did with &quot;Charlie Bit Me.&quot; It's obviously easier to get lots of views if a few popular sites embed or link to the video—the main reason that the bumblebee mascot got so popular, for example, is that it was <a href="http://colunas.globoesporte.com/bolanascostas/2009/05/27/soco-do-mascote/">embedded</a> on the Portuguese-language sports site Globo Esporte.</p>
<p>A short-term experiment like this one doesn't have a chance of sussing out a phenomenon like &quot;Charlie Bit Me,&quot; which didn't go viral until months after it was posted. I'll post an update to this piece if I discover in the coming weeks that I managed to catch such a long-gestating monster. Anything's possible, but considering that just 3 percent of my videos have as many as 1,000 views, I'd say the odds of that happening are vanishingly small.</p>
<p>These figures certainly don't ratify the grand promise of social media. Not everyone uses YouTube to launch their showbiz or political career, but the potential to do so is central to the Web 2.0 narrative that figures in so many <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570743,00.html">newsmagazine panegyrics</a>. When the odds of even 1,000 people viewing your video in a month's time are only 3 percent, however, it's tough to argue that hitting it big on YouTube is anything more than dumb luck. You could argue that this is the way it's always been in show biz, and you'd be right. But wasn't the Web supposed to change all that?</p>Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:15:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/07/will_my_video_get_1_million_views_on_youtube.htmlChris Wilson2009-07-02T14:15:00ZA Slate investigation reveals: not a chance.TechnologyWill my video get 1 million views on YouTube?2221553Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2221553falsefalsefalseWill my video get 1 million views on YouTube?Will my video get 1 million views on YouTube?The Death of Windowshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/06/the_death_of_windows.html
<p> There are two kinds of Web surfers in the world. Some prefer to open new pages as tabs within the same browser window. Others open each Web page as a new window, accumulating lots of entries on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. On the face of it, this battle between Ctrl-T and Ctrl-N seems totally mundane. A few years from now, however, I think we'll look back on the gradual drift to tabs as the browser's bid for emancipation. Using tabs to multitask eliminates the need for new windows. Down the line, it may eliminate the need for Windows altogether. When you open a new tab, it's as if your browser is telling you, <em>Pay no attention to anything else on your computer. Everything you need is right here.</em></p>
<p>Mozilla made tabbed browsing mainstream by incorporating the feature into Firefox. Now the software nonprofit is looking for new ways to keep all of your activities in-house. Last month, Mozilla announced a <a href="http://design-challenge.mozilla.com/summer09/">design contest</a> soliciting ideas for a better way to manage lots of pages at once. &quot;Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common,&quot; the announcement read. &quot;[T]he browser is more of an operating system than a data display application.&quot;</p>
<p>This isn't so much <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_creep">mission creep</a> for Firefox as mission ambush. Chrome, the Google browser that launched last fall, betrayed similar ambitions in a <a href="http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_00.html">38-page comic book</a> that was created to promote the product. &quot;Today, most of what we use the Web for on a day-to-day basis aren't just Web pages, they're applications,&quot; read the first panel of the first page.</p>
<p>In the last few years, scores of applications that your operating system used to manage have migrated to the browser: word processors, IM clients, e-mail, games, music players, personal finance tools, and on and on. Which leads inevitably to the question: If the primary function of computers these days is to run a browser and connect to the Internet, do we really need Windows and its <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html">50 million lines of code</a>?</p>
<p>The browser-as-OS is certainly an attractive idea, if only as an alternative to Windows' bloat and sluggish performance. Firefox, with its open platform and sprawling library of free add-ons, seems in theory like a much better model for how your PC's core software should work. </p>
<p>Developers at Mozilla, Google, and other non-Microsoft shops are eager to talk about how we're all set to relocate personal computing to the browser. In real life, though, not many of us have fully embraced the idea of porting all of our treasured applications to the Web. You may use Google Docs when you need to collaborate with someone at work, but that novel you've been chipping away at is on your hard drive as a Word document.</p>
<p>Mozilla and Google are counting on changing the way you think. Sam Schillace, who developed the application that would become Google Docs, described the transition to me this way: Like many new technologies, Web-based office products went through an initial &quot;dancing bear&quot; phase, where novelty was the main attraction. Next, second-wave adopters came to the product because they have a specific need for its sharing tools, either because they want to collaborate or because of the ease of accessing a document from many different machines. The third wave, Schillace hopes, will eventually be drawn in by the product's austerity. In the programming world, this is known as the &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better">worse is better</a>&quot; approach. It's not necessarily a bad thing that Google Docs will never have all the tools and gizmos that are built into Microsoft Word. That's because it's easier for a new technology to lure in skeptics if it's simple and straight-forward, even if that means sacrificing functionality. </p>
<p>Anyone who has skirmished with Word's animated assistant Clippy—may he <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/09/microsoft-clippy-rip-1997-2007/">rest in peace</a>—has a horror story about battling Word's oft-unnecessary complexity. All in all, though, Word works pretty well, and getting people to stop using something they're satisfied with is never easy. Excel, too, is a masterful program, and one that far outshines any of the online wannabes featurewise.</p>
<p>It's worth remembering, too, that Windows is more than just an interface for running programs. It also manages your hardware—the hard drive and video card as well as peripherals like webcams and external memory devices. Even if Firefox or Chrome takes over application management someday soon, we'll still need something to handle all of that under-the-hood stuff. One intriguing option is a piece of software called HyperSpace that <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2211507,00.asp">debuted in late 2007</a>. HyperSpace is essentially a bare-bones OS that can fire up some of your computer's resources right when it boots, long before Windows has burped and sputtered awake from its coma. (The company that makes HyperSpace, Phoenix, is a major supplier of <a href="http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bios.htm">BIOS</a> software, the code that runs immediately when you turn on your machine and takes attendance for all your hardware.) The current version of the product, which works on certain laptops—specifications <a href="http://www.hyperspace.com/Product-Specifications.aspx">here</a>—loads in a few seconds and can get online, run Firefox, and boot a handful of other programs. These days, you can get a lot done with just that tiny amount of software. (If you're curious to try HyperSpace, you can <a href="http://www.hyperspace.com/Download.aspx">demo it for free for 21 days</a>. After that, running the software requires an annual fee.)<br /><br /></p>
<p>Pair a Web browser—which runs all your programs—and a lightweight OS—which fires up the browser—and you begin to see what a viable alternative to a Windows machine might look like. There's one piece left: Whichever browser you choose has to be able to handle all that activity. This is where Chrome starts to look prescient. As <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s Farhad Manjoo <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2199356/">has written</a>, Google's browser handles the Web's whiz-bang programming with remarkable smoothness. Chrome may lack Firefox's library of add-ons, but it ensures that fancy Web applications are less likely to devour your computer's resources. It also does a creditable job of keeping single frozen Web pages from bringing down the whole application. (Imagine if every time Word crashed it brought all of Windows down with it—that's where most browsers are today.)</p>
<p>Chrome may command only <a href="http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1">1.8 percent of the market</a>, but it has already incited an arms race among competitors who realize that browsers must be stable for Web apps to take off. At this point, I would give up Word—and maybe even my beloved Excel—for a computer that boots instantly, lacks the headaches of Windows, and runs a reliable browser that houses serviceable alternatives to Office products. We're not there yet, and the transition will surely involve a pandemic of bugs and compatibility nightmares. And let's remember that Microsoft has killed off <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2">potential usurpers</a> before. Nevertheless, I'm betting this would-be giant slayer has a fighting chance.</p>Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:30:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/06/the_death_of_windows.htmlChris Wilson2009-06-18T13:30:00ZStep aside, bloated operating systems. The Web browser is coming to save the day.TechnologyStep aside, Windows. The Web browser is coming to save the day.2220371Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2220371falsefalsefalseStep aside, Windows. The Web browser is coming to save the day.Step aside, Windows. The Web browser is coming to save the day.The Craigslist Sex Panichttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/05/the_craigslist_sex_panic.html
<p> Craigslist, the San Francisco-based online marketplace that's been around for nearly as long as the Web, has always hosted ads for prostitution. That supposedly changed earlier this month when <a href="http://blog.craigslist.org/2009/05/striking-a-new-balance/">the site closed its &quot;erotic services&quot; section</a>, replacing it with an &quot;adult services&quot; page where posts must be preapproved to ensure they don't offer sex for sale. For all appearances, the move is a concession to the panic over Philip Markoff, the accused &quot;<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/04/20/2009-04-20_massachussetts_police_arrest_suspect_in_craigslist_killer_case.html">Craigslist Killer</a>,&quot; who has been charged with the murder and assault of Erotic Services advertisers this April.</p>
<p>Leading the campaign against Craigslist prostitution is Richard Blumenthal. The Connecticut attorney general, hot off <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/technology/internet/14cyberweb.html?scp=7&amp;sq=blumenthal%20myspace&amp;st=Search">a war on Facebook and MySpace</a> for their alleged exposure of young people to sexual predation, started a <a href="http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?A=2341&amp;Q=412348">crusade against Craigslist last March</a>. (He was <a href="http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?A=2795&amp;Q=427448">joined by 39 more</a> attorneys general in November.) Sure enough, when Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster announced the company's decision to kill the site's sex ads, Blumenthal and his supporters <a href="http://www.crn.com/software/217500170;jsessionid=KJPIWPE3ZLUFWQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN">declared victory</a>. What exactly has Blumenthal won, though? By organizing and consolidating a sector of the informal economy, Craigslist was certainly helpful for sexual-service providers. But it also was a major boon for law enforcement, which could centralize its sting operations—thanks to Craigslist, a bust was only a mouse-click away. While the death of the erotic-services section is a PR win for Blumenthal—and for Craigslist, which can claim that it's cleaned up its act—it's terrible news for sex workers, who will lose a measure of safety, and for beat cops, who will now find it harder to crack down on the sex trade that Blumenthal supposedly wants to end.</p>
<p>Though the Connecticut attorney general has deemed it &quot;<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/13/craigslist.sex.ads/">a blatant Internet brothel</a>,&quot; Craigslist is closer to Times Square in its heyday. Alongside vendors hawking used books, cheap electronics, and hand-me-down gold jewelry, you'll also find half-baked scams, poorly spelled signage, and sex for sale and trade. It's also wrong to reduce the now-shuttered erotic-services section to an &quot;<a href="http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?A=2341&amp;Q=439912">online red light district</a>.&quot; The thousands of listings posted there every day offered a range of unpredictable commercial experiences, the majority of which required actual adults to meet in actual homes and hotels to have them. Far from unregulated public sex, each interaction had to begin with a few e-mails and, often, a light background check. These transactions might not always have gone as advertised, but they were rarely harmful or resulted in headlines.</p>
<p>What does make news is a sex panic. After the murder of Julissa Brisman, a Boston-area woman who sold massage sessions in Craigslist's erotic-services section, Blumenthal's complaints about the site suddenly had urgency. Forgotten in that moment was the fact that, though sex workers do face real threats of violence, Craigslist isn't responsible for generating interest in the age-old institution of buying and selling sex. The claims of Blumenthal and his allies that their campaign against prostitution ads will &quot;<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=7575574&amp;page=1">prevent the exploitation of women and children</a>&quot; ignore the obvious fact that there will always be a black market for sex. No matter how successful you are at driving prostitution underground, someone will find a way to profit from it and control it.</p>
<p>Craigslist's erotic-services section was simply the latest and most visible underground marketplace, a sexual public square so easily accessible to consumers, providers, and window-shoppers that it made prostitution seem less risky. For sex workers, it actually was safer than working on the streets or advertising in a newspaper. Craigslist enabled sex workers to screen potential customers and to work for themselves rather than rely on a pimp or agency. With the erotic-services section, work conditions also improved for the vice squad, whose job was made all the easier by having a dedicated and high-traffic venue to police. </p>
<p>The most significant difference between Craigslist and a brothel is that the former voluntarily opens its &quot;black book&quot; of clients to police. The records Craigslist maintains on its users played a critical role in apprehending the so-called Craigslist Killer. The Boston Police Department reported that &quot;Craigslist was cooperative in identifying and locating&quot; accused murderer Philip Markoff; Craigslist spokeswoman Susan Best notes that &quot;a digital trail left by those breaking the law&quot; allows Craigslist to support criminal investigations in a way, say, a newspaper cannot. In the case of Markoff, what could have become a series of murders was put to a quick halt once his inbox was examined. Boston cops said <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/04/bu_student_char.html">they relied on these &quot;high-tech&quot; solutions as much as &quot;shoe-leather&quot; investigation</a>. The lesson here for those in law enforcement—and a lesson that Richard Blumenthal fails to understand—is that Craigslist is an ally, not a perp.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p>
<p>The reason that Craigslist's erotic-services section no longer exists is that the site made sex work safer without intending to, and without any input from the cops. Craigslist's power in the field of online prostitution appears to be far more threatening to Blumenthal, et al., than any modern-day Jack the Ripper who targets those who advertise there. If public safety is his goal—and not a run at the governor's office—then Blumenthal ought to reconsider who his enemies and allies are in his fight to keep the sex trade in check.</p>Wed, 27 May 2009 20:59:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/05/the_craigslist_sex_panic.htmlMelissa Gira Grant2009-05-27T20:59:00ZHow shutting down its &quot;erotic services&quot; section hurts prostitutes and cops.TechnologyHow shutting down Craigslist's &quot;erotic services&quot; section hurts prostitutes and cops.2219167Melissa Gira GrantWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2219167falsefalsefalseHow shutting down Craigslist's "erotic services" section hurts prostitutes and cops.How shutting down Craigslist's "erotic services" section hurts prostitutes and cops.Connecticut Attorney General Richard BlumenthalI'm Human, Computer, I Swear!http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/04/im_human_computer_i_swear.html
<p> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2216878"></a> If only someone had listened to computer scientist Moni Naor in 1996, proving that you're human on the Internet would have been so much more interesting. Naor was among the first to propose that simple tests only humans can solve would prevent malicious bots from infiltrating the Web. In an unpublished <a href="http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/123097/2210695/2215498/naor_paper.pdf">manuscript</a>, Naor proposed nine possible tests, including gender recognition in images, fill-in-the-blank sentences, and a &quot;deciding nudity&quot; quiz in which you're asked to identify which person isn't wearing any clothes.</p>
<p>Alas, rather than getting to play &quot;find the naked person&quot; every time we sign up for a webmail account, we're now stuck with those reviled squiggly letter tests known as <a href="http://www.captcha.net/">CAPTCHAs</a>. Let's give credit where credit's due: These tests have been incredibly effective in combating spam. But even CAPTCHA pioneer Luis von Ahn, who received a MacArthur genius grant on account of his squiggly-letter work, admitted to me that they won't be a solution forever. For all their success, these tests are a crude way to weed out the bots among us. And they have proliferated to so many sites that the task of proving your humanity on the Internet is beginning to feel like an imposition.</p>
<p>This guess-the-funny-letters approach has been the dominant strategy in bot warfare for the past decade or so. As spammers have gotten more sophisticated, the CAPTCHAs have gotten harder to solve. Now, it's not at all uncommon for flesh-and-blood people to botch the tests, failing to convince the computer of their <em>Homo sapiens</em> credentials.</p>
<p>There is something uniquely vexing about having your humanity disputed by a machine. Don't blame the computer. While humans are perfectly capable of spotting a machine masquerading as a human on the Internet—the classic definition of a <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/">Turing test</a>—it gets much more difficult when you're asking a computer to be the judge, particularly as hackers get better at teaching computers to read. Tech publications regularly report that <a href="http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/10/right-back-at-ya-captcha-bad-guys-crack-gmail-hotmail.ars">this or that CAPTCHA has been cracked</a> by spammers, though there's often some dispute over whether the culprits are using <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&amp;articleId=73023">optical character recognition</a> or simply <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1835">paying people in India to solve them</a> en masse. (<a href="http://decaptcher.com/client/">This site</a>, for example, charges $2 per 1,000 solutions.) An engineer at Google told me that the company has collected evidence of OCR attacks on its CAPTCHAs but believes the majority of illicit solving is being done by humans.</p>
<p>We all despise spam, but using CAPTCHAs as a first line of defense often amounts to killing a mosquito with a squiggly machete. Serving readers these Pictionary exercises might be called for in situations with high-value targets, like free webmail services that get conscripted to send more spam. But is it really necessary for me to fill out a CAPTCHA in order to <a href="http://media.cla.auburn.edu/english/email/form2.cfm?addressee=">send an e-mail</a> to an English professor at Auburn University?</p>
<p>These days, most of the advances in human verification involve new and improved tests. Google is <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10222514-2.html">experimenting with rotated images</a>, since computers still have trouble telling up from down. Von Ahn currently runs a system called <a href="http://recaptcha.net/">reCAPTCHA</a> that helps digitize books in the process of getting people to identify words. (He says reCAPTCHA, which is used by more than 100,000 sites, is still spammer-proof.) For some really nutty proposals, check out <a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cis/theses/daher-masters.pdf">this paper</a>, which proposes a series of word association games and inkblot tests.</p>
<p>I don't doubt that these innovations can extend CAPTCHA's lifespan for at least a few years. But I don't think this should be the goal. Rather, developers should be moving away from a system where humans have to prove they're human, particularly for sites that are low-value targets. (No offense, Auburn English department.) Ideally, software should be able to figure out who's a human on its own.</p>
<p>To that end, there are a few interesting techniques that can at least weed out the dumbest spambots. Developer James Edwards offers a nice <a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/article/captcha-problems-alternatives/3/">overview of noninteractive alternatives</a>. My favorite is the &quot;honeypot&quot; defense: Since bots live inside the Internet and see HTML, not the pretty versions of Web pages our browsers make for us, they can have a difficult time figuring out what's visible to humans and what isn't. So when they see a submission form—say, to submit a comment to a blog—they're inclined to enter something in all the fields and try to post it. The honeypot here is an input field that is invisible to readers. As a human, you will never know this secret input box exists, and even if you did, there would be no way for you to access it. If the site receives a submission in the invisible field, then, it's probably coming from a bot and can be automatically discarded.</p>
<p>Spammers, of course, are dedicated, able, and not easily fooled. Anyone trying to target a specific site would not have much trouble bypassing this defense. But for sites whose main threat comes from roving bots that paint with a wide brush, these sorts of solutions are sensible. </p>
<p>For more robust protection, my hope lies in systems like <a href="http://akismet.com/">Akismet</a>, which applies a complex algorithm on blog comments to determine whether they are spam. It's in the same vein as e-mail spam filters that examine the content of a message and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. These filters have gotten a lot better over the years—it's no longer possible to fool the e-mail watchdogs by spelling your product <em>R0lex</em>. Another automatic system called <a href="http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/">Bad Behavior</a> boasts that it doesn't even bother with the content. Instead, it uses what it <a href="http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/documentation/how-it-works/">calls</a> a &quot;fingerprinting&quot; strategy to identify spammers based on technical characteristics, like the IP address and the details of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_headers">HTTP request</a>, exploiting the fact that most spammers are sloppy programmers who leave at least a few digital red flags waving. </p>
<p>Herein lies the key to leaving squiggly letters behind. As Alan Turing laid out in the <a href="http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html">1950 paper</a> that postulated his test, the goal is to determine whether a computer can <em>behave</em> like a human, not perform tasks that a human can. The reason CAPTCHAs have a term limit is that they measure ability, not behavior. The history of computing shows us that machines will eventually learn how to perform all manner of tasks—like identifying words, for instance—that we currently assume only humans can solve.</p>
<p>How might it be possible to measure behavior rather than ability? The other day, I was writing a note to company using the online form they provided for media requests, doing the usual amount of typing, backspacing, and retyping as I tried to phrase my note in a way that would make them respond quickly. It occurred to me that the random, circuitous way that people interact with Web pages—the scrolling and highlighting and typing and retyping—would be very difficult for a bot to mimic. A system that could capture the way humans interact with forms algorithmically could eventually relieve humans of the need to prove anything altogether. </p>
<p>Any solution that could replace CAPTCHAs en masse would have to be free, work across a wide variety of platforms, and be easy for the average blogger or Web admin to install. One of the reasons that CAPTCHAs have spread like kudzu, I suspect, is that they're so easy to implement—in some cases, as simple as checking a box on a site that helps you set up an input form. The more a bot-fighting algorithm can insinuate itself behind the scenes, the better. In the meantime, we'll all have to keep debating the eternal question: Is that a <em>W</em>, or is it a <em>V</em> and an <em>I</em> attached at the hip?</p>Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:28:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/04/im_human_computer_i_swear.htmlChris Wilson2009-04-24T16:28:00ZIt's time to move beyond those squiggly letter tests that Web sites use to weed out spam.TechnologyIt's time to move beyond those squiggly letter tests.2216837Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2216837falsefalsefalseIt's time to move beyond those squiggly letter tests.It's time to move beyond those squiggly letter tests.I See You Typinghttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/04/i_see_you_typing.html
<p> The China-based cyber-spy network known as &quot;GhostNet&quot; is a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/29spy.html">sophisticated group of hackers</a> capable of logging its victims' keystrokes, stealing their documents, capturing images from their screens—and staring creepily at them through their webcams.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/Tracking-GhostNet-Investigating-a-Cyber-Espionage-Network">report</a> released last month, Canadian researchers concluded that GhostNet has cracked at least 1,295 computers in 103 different countries, specifically targeting the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan activists and officials. Stealing documents and logging keystrokes—that I understand. You can get all sorts of useful information reading someone's e-mail or looking at their bank records. But peeking at them through their Web cameras? That seems creepy even by the standards of shady cyber-spying rings. It's one thing to read the Dalai Lama's IM conversations. It's another to actually watch him LOL. </p>
<p>GhostNet might be the most prominent example yet of webcam infiltration, but it's certainly not the first. The practice dates back to 1998, when a group of hackers calling itself the Cult of the Dead Cow designed a piece of software that, when downloaded onto a computer, let someone control the machine remotely. Anything you could do sitting at your desk, they could do thousands of miles away, from creating documents to playing MP3s to popping open the disk drive. They dubbed the program <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice">Back Orifice</a>—a twist on Microsoft's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BackOffice_Server">BackOffice</a>. The authors &quot;were not malicious guys,&quot; says Frank Heidt, CEO of Leviathan Security. &quot;They thought it was funny as hell.&quot; </p>
<p>Webcam scams do occur, though they're far less common than other types of online extortion. In 2004, four hackers in Spain were <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/16/webcam_trojan_scam/">arrested</a> after threatening to post candid webcam videos online unless their victims paid up. In 2008, a Canadian man <a href="http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=a72fba18-6960-4093-9f96-1555883e3801">told</a> young girls that he had nude pictures of them and would post them on the Internet unless they posed for him again. </p>
<p>Governments and businesses have adapted. For example, the Department of Defense has regulations about where you can carry a laptop. And unlike the most advanced <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2214970/">computer worms</a>, this isn't a threat that's constantly evolving to outpace security measures. </p>
<p>Since Back Orifice hit the market, the basic methods of cyber-peeping haven't changed much: Just get your target to download an e-mail attachment or click a link that triggers an automatic download, activate the camera, then sit back and watch. &quot;Writing the malware is a total triviality&quot; even for middling programmers, Heidt says. Back Orifice is still available for download, and beginners can find instructions on how to write their own programs with a simple Google search. Or you can just <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/150465">take a college course on how to do it</a>.</p>
<p>What's changed is the prevalence of cameras. You can't buy an Apple laptop these days without a built-in camera. Even Sony's <a href="http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&amp;storeId=10151&amp;langId=-1&amp;categoryId=8198552921644608896&amp;parentCategoryId=16154">smallest notebook</a> has a webcam. Sometimes they're practically invisible: The MacBook Air's built-in camera is &quot;so smartly integrated, you hardly notice it's there,&quot; <a href="http://www.apple.com/macbookair/features.html">brags</a> Apple. That said, almost all laptops have a light that turns on whenever the camera is on—a feature that hackers can't disable since it's controlled electronically, not programmatically. </p>
<p>Still, webcam espionage isn't very common. Most scammers are interested in money, and video of someone's slack-jawed mug isn't going to yield much cash. <a></a>&quot;Most stuff you'd capture on a camera, they've already posted on Facebook,&quot; says Kevin Haley of Symantec Security Response. <a href="http://www.slate.com#correction">*</a><strong></strong>Even if you did have hundreds of hours of video and audio capturing someone's conversations, it's a lot harder to index and search than written information. (Some programs solve this problem by activating the camera <a href="http://dorgem.sourceforge.net/">only if they sense movement</a>.) If it's profit the hacker wants, the contents of the computer are much more valuable than whatever's happening in front of it.</p>
<p>If someone hacks into a webcam, therefore, it's usually a targeted attack. Pure creepiness is one motivation. A 15-year-old girl in Texas <a href="http://www.click2houston.com/technology/3324710/detail.html">reported</a> in 2004 that a hacker who took over her computer would eject the disk drive and say things like, &quot;I like your shirt.&quot; </p>
<p>Then there's spying on people you'd like to keep an eye on, such as, say, your spouse. One could see this being useful for private investigators, though PIs I spoke with say they don't know of anyone hacking into webcams as part of their work. &quot;The technology is there for it to happen,&quot; says Charles McLaughlin, a PI in Andover, Mass. &quot;But in the private sector, although there are some characters willing to break the law, most reputable PIs don't.&quot; You might get away with it if you install the spyware own your own computer—say, the one in the bedroom—but even that gets into shady legal territory. </p>
<p>More threatening than video is audio. By accessing a computer's microphone, you turn the computer into a bug. It's also more clandestine than video, since the microphone is always on and there's usually no light to tip you off when it's recording. &quot;The mic thing worries me a lot more,&quot; says Chris Wysopal of the security firm Veracode. &quot;Unless you can lip-read, [video alone] isn't that useful.&quot;</p>
<p>So how do you prevent someone from spying on you? The usual Internet hygiene applies. Don't click the weird attachment your computer-illiterate relatives send you, update your antivirus software regularly, and so forth. If you want to be <em>really</em> cautious, the best solution is the simplest: Put a piece of tape over the camera. It may be the laptop equivalent of the tinfoil hat, but it's the only way to absolutely guarantee privacy. The microphone is trickier, since you can't tape it up. You can disable it, though, by plugging a converter or some other cord into the computer's microphone jack, which turns off the internal mic. </p>
<p>But ultimately, there's only so much you can do. Vulnerability is a fact of cyber life: Anytime you open a portal to the outside world, it makes intrusion possible. The problem is when we don't even know the portal exists, or are only dimly aware of it. There's a general rule that you shouldn't write anything in an e-mail that you wouldn't want shared with the world. Perhaps the same should apply to dancing in your underwear while your laptop is watching.</p>
<p><strong><em>Correction,</em> <a><em></em></a><em>April 6, 2009</em></strong><em>: This article originally misspelled the name of Symantec Security Response. (</em> <a href="http://www.slate.com#return"><em>Return</em></a><em> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:09:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/04/i_see_you_typing.htmlChristopher Beam2009-04-06T21:09:00ZSpying on someone by hacking into&nbsp;his webcam is disturbingly easy. Why don't more people do it?TechnologyThe uncanny ease of spying on someone by hacking&nbsp;into his&nbsp;webcam.2215499Christopher BeamWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2215499falsefalsefalseThe uncanny ease of spying on someone by hacking into his webcam.The uncanny ease of spying on someone by hacking into his webcam.A&nbsp;webcamYe Olde Social Networkhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/03/ye_olde_social_network.html
<p> Charlena, Yetta, Wan, Aracely, LaNtRah, and Larue all say, &quot;Hey.&quot; So does Joe—a woman, judging by the photograph showing her in a teal bikini and cowboy hat. <em>Hey</em> is the subject heading that each of these lovely ladies chose for the messages they sent me via <a href="http://www.friendster.com/">Friendster</a>, a social-networking site that I haven't visited with any regularity since 2006. While the subject headings were the same, the messages themselves were different. Aracely, Larue, and Yetta invited me to a second online location to—yikes—check out their nude photos. Charlena, Joe, and Wan had found dating sites they thought would be perfect for me. LaNtRah, for her part, was alerting me to a work-from-home opportunity in which, &quot;for just 5USDOLLAR,&quot; I could &quot;get back more than hundreds for just 1months.&quot;</p>
<p>If it sounds like I'm bragging about all my hot online dalliances, I'm not. It's easy enough to tell that my weirdly forward, grammar-challenged e-harem does not contain any real people. <a></a> Skylar and Patricia have the same photo atop their profiles, and said photo is actually of model/actress Jaime King. <a href="http://www.slate.com#Correction">*</a> Furthermore, the information in both Melody's and Taylor's profiles is about someone who goes by Angelina and whose gallery of friends includes a girl who lists her name as &quot;Extreme Ass.&quot; The occupations listed on the profiles—Skylar is a &quot;sexton,&quot; Cheyanne a &quot;turner&quot;—also seem kind of suspicious. And humans—whether they're named Patricia or Extreme Ass, whether they work as sextons or turners—don't ordinarily end messages, as Aracely did, by typing &quot;Im not a robot LOL.&quot;</p>
<p>The real giveaway that all these messages were fake was that they arrived via Friendster in the first place. As <a href="http://spamkings.oreilly.com/archives/2006/01/author_of_myspace_bot_denies_w_1.html">MySpace users know well</a>, Friendster is hardly the only social network beset with spam-bots. It's just that on Friendster, the robots often seem to be the only ones talking. </p>
<p>Friendster's heyday came just a few years ago. The social-networking site was founded in 2002 by a former Netscape engineer named Jonathan Abrams, and it quickly attracted millions of users. The concept of social networking had existed long before, but Friendster arrived at the right time and was, for a while, a lively scene. It didn't do anything Facebook doesn't currently do better—namely, provide a classy-looking venue through which users could stay in touch with friends, ogle other people's friends, and kill time making lists of random stuff. But the fact that it did those things at all was exciting and new back then.</p>
<p>Google offered $30 million for Friendster in 2003; venture capitalists assured Abrams that the company could soon be worth far more, and he demurred. Friendster might well have delivered on that promise, but the site quickly buckled under the weight of its new users and the squabbling Silicon Valley heavyweights on its board. Overwhelmed servers made the site painfully slow to load, potential innovations never quite got implemented, and Friendster was in eclipse by 2004. In an irony Charlena and Yetta would no doubt appreciate, this slide coincided with the emergence of an autocratic streak that found its fullest expression in Friendster's quest to find and destroy &quot;fakesters,&quot; which management defined as anyone whose profile featured, say, a jokey name or a picture of the profile holder's cat. Everyone moved to the less-uptight MySpace, then the ubiquitous Facebook. By 2006, the company was being <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html?_r=2&amp;pagewanted=all">eulogized in the <em>New York Times</em></a>. Spammy, forgotten, robot-ruled, and dusty, Friendster was thought of, if it was thought of at all, in the past tense.</p>
<p>Former users returning after a long absence will find friends' profiles resting in a circa-2006 state. My old roommate, who has earned a master's degree, worked at a newspaper in Minneapolis, gotten married, and moved to the South Pacific with his wife since he ceased to be my roommate, is still sleeping right next-door, per Friendster. Other friends have deactivated their profiles and disappeared from the site entirely. The Americans joining Friendster now don't seem like a cross-section of any particular demographic—a recent perusal found a 63-year-old dad-type, alongside a mustachioed 41-year-old Canadian (&quot;Interested In: Relationship with Women&quot;), whose profile in turn abuts that of a woman whose foxy picture and flirty, sparsely filled-in profile strongly suggest that she's a Charlena. Another Friendster newbie has the plaintive quote &quot;Where Is Everybody?!?&quot; atop her profile. </p>
<p>American Friendster users are out there, but the only ones still avidly using Friendster seem—from my hours of admittedly unscientific browsing—to be Asian-Americans in California or gay men, for whom the site has become a popular dating network. Venture outside those groups, and clicking around Friendster feels like roaming an abandoned space station.</p>
<p>But as seen in those weird transmissions to my inbox, Friendster does still exist. Despite the fact that Friendster trails Facebook, MySpace, and numerous other social-networking sites in the American market, the company continues to raise venture capital at an impressive clip, including a $20 million infusion <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/friendster-lives-new-cash-new-ceo-and-a-new-strategy/">last summer</a>. Why are people still dumping cash into what looks like a social-networking graveyard? Because real human beings—plenty of them, actually—still log on to Friendster. It's just that now they're all logging on from Asia.</p>
<p>According to comScore, Friendster had roughly 30 million unique visitors in December 2008. More than 28 million of those visitors came from Asia. Friendster's internal tracking suggests that the comScore tally—which doesn't include visits from Internet cafes—actually understates the site's traffic. If so, that would make Friendster roughly as popular in Asia as Facebook and MySpace combined. And Friendster's users spend more time on the site, on average, than users of any other social-networking site.</p>
<p>Friendster has embraced its new identity as one of Asia's preferred online hangouts. The company is currently ramping up its operations in Singapore and the Philippines, a country where 90 percent of the Internet-enabled population has a Friendster page. David Jones, the company's vice president of marketing, posits that the site's strength in the Bay Area's Asian-American community during the good old days led to its rise across the Pacific. Social-networking blogger Danah Boyd <a href="http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html">advances</a> the two-pronged theory that Asian users were more accustomed to and tolerant of a slow Internet experience and that Abrams—who became a despised figure during the fakester fiasco—&quot;did not seem like as big of a dick&quot; in Asia. Whatever the cause, Friendster's Asian dominance probably became self-fulfilling at some point: If you're in the Philippines and doing your social networking on Facebook, you're probably awfully lonesome.</p>
<p>For an American ex-user, though, Friendster is the lonesome place. I like to imagine the site as a series of concentric constellations. The innermost space enfolds Friendster's quiet multitudes: a galaxy of ex-users whose junked profiles still float around the network, several sad years out of date. The next, larger ring contains the site's noisy, surging millions: the newly plugged-in users in Asia who, writing in Tagalog or Indonesian or Malay (or, most often, English), are obeying the apparently universal human impulse to create colorful, flirty online profiles for themselves. Further out, in the coldest and most distantly notional regions of the Internet, is my e-harem of robotic spam-slatterns. More than 100,000 users still join Friendster daily, which Jones, the Friendster VP, claims makes it harder to detect and delete the Charlenas. As long as real people keep coming, the robots will, too. Friendster wouldn't be the weirdly vital relic that it is—wouldn't be, period—without them both.</p>
<p><em><strong>Correction, <a></a> March 5, 2009: </strong>This piece originally misspelled the first name of model/actress Jaime King. (<a href="http://www.slate.com#Return">Return</a> &nbsp;to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:35:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/03/ye_olde_social_network.htmlDavid Roth2009-03-05T11:35:00ZFriendster is at once a thriving success and a robot-ruled ghost planet.TechnologyFriendster is at once a thriving success and a robot-ruled ghost planet.2212833David RothWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2212833falsefalsefalseFriendster is at once a thriving success and a robot-ruled ghost planet.Friendster is at once a thriving success and a robot-ruled ghost planet.Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebookhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/02/charles_darwin_tagged_you_in_a_note_on_facebook.html
<p> Last week, I enlisted <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> readers to help divine <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2210697/">how Facebook's &quot;25 Random Things About Me&quot; trend got started</a>. More than 3,000 of you responded, answering queries on when you first saw a &quot;25 Things&quot; note, when you were first tagged, and when (if ever) you wrote your own note. On one level, the survey was a failure: I had hoped to find the trend's Patient Zero, but there's likely no single person who conceived of this scheme. But the absence of a singular &quot;25 Things&quot; creator reveals something much more interesting: Facebook organisms are not created by intelligent design. They evolve.</p>
<p>The idea that culture spreads in biological ways has been around for a while. Richard Dawkins coined the term <em>meme</em> in 1976's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192860925?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0192860925"><em>The Selfish Gene</em></a> to describe how ideas propagate according to evolutionary principles of mutation and selection. A quantitative study of the &quot;25 Things&quot; letter seems to ratify that. </p>
<p>As many readers noted in our survey, &quot;25 Things&quot; wasn't always &quot;25 Things.&quot; Late last fall, a chain letter titled &quot;16 Random Things About Me&quot; began to chew its way through Facebook. The author of one of these notes would itemize her personality into &quot;16 random things, facts, habits, or goals,&quot; then tag 16 friends who would be prompted to write their own lists. And so on and so on. Similar navel-gazing letters had popped up over the years through e-mail and on blogs, MySpace, Friendster, and the venerable blogging site LiveJournal. The Facebook strain had a good run, but by the end of 2008 it appeared to have stagnated.</p>
<p>Then something curious happened: It mutated. Since everyone who participates is supposed to paste the original instructions into her own note, it's easy to tinker with the rules. Soon enough, 16 things (and 16 tagged friends) morphed into 15—and 17 and 22 and 35 and even 100. As the structure crumbled, more users toyed with the boundaries. Like any disease, &quot;Random Things&quot; was mutating in hopes of finding a strain that uniquely suited its host. In this case, the right number was vital to its survival: The more people who are tagged, the more likely the note is to spread. The longer the list, though, the more daunting it is to compose and the fewer participants will be roped in.</p>
<p>By mid-to-late January, &quot;25 Random Things About Me&quot; had warded off its competitors. Once the letter settled on 25 things (a perfect square, just like 16) the phenomenon exploded. The data we collected reveal a clear tipping point around this time. </p>
<p>As the graph below indicates (Fig. 1), the number of people swept up in the trend climbed steeply for a week starting around Jan. 20, peaking in the last days of the month before declining sharply. Not coincidentally, the Web analytics firm Compete reports that January 2009 was one of Facebook's biggest months for traffic growth.</p>
<p>A graph of when people wrote their own 25 Things note (Fig. 2) forms a very similar curve.</p>
<p><strong></strong></p>
<p>Since I'm no evolutionary expert, I shipped <em><strong>Slate</strong></em>'s data to Lauren Ancel Meyers, a biology professor at the University of Texas who <a href="http://www.utexas.edu/features/archive/2003/meyers.html">models the spread of infectious diseases</a> mathematically. Meyers says that around Day 39 of Fig. 1, we see the &quot;classic exponential growth of an epidemic curve.&quot; (Day 39 in this graph is Jan. 8.) She also explains that &quot;25 Things&quot; authors can be seen as &quot;contagious&quot; under what's known as a &quot;<a href="http://www.math.duke.edu/education/ccp/materials/postcalc/sir/sir2.html">susceptible-infected-recovered</a>&quot; model for the spread of disease. Think of &quot;25 Things&quot; authors as being contagious for one day—the day they tag a bunch of their friends. Meyers found that, for that one day, the growth parameter of the &quot;25 Things&quot; disease during its ascent phase (roughly until the beginning of February) was 0.27. This means that, on average, each &quot;25 Things&quot; writer inspired 1.27 new notes. </p>
<p>Another one of our survey questions considered the average number of days between when a person is tagged and when she writes a note. Those results are graphed here.</p>
<p>The highest percentage of respondents—17 percent of those who wrote a note—composed their missive the same day they were first tagged. The numbers decay from there, and the median value is three days. Meyers found that this too was best described exponentially, though the figures decline instead of increase over time. You can think of it like radioactive decay. In the same way that, say, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-231">Thorium-231 atoms</a> have about a 50 percent chance of decaying each day, regardless of how many days they've been around, people tagged in a &quot;25 Things&quot; note do not become more or less likely to participate as time passes. Meyers does note, however, that these calculations do not factor in individuals who choose not to participate or have yet to do so.</p>
<p>Why does it appear that the &quot;25 Things&quot; fad has died out? One could argue that a selection bias in <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s data are exaggerating the decline, as those who haven't yet encountered the meme are likely underrepresented. I don't think this is the case, though. As we see in Fig. 3, most people write their notes within a week of being tagged for the first time. The decline we see in Figures 1 and 2, then, is likely legitimate: Because the fad peaked more than 10 days ago, it's unlikely that there is a large number of people who've been tagged who are still waiting to write their own note. My guess is that, like a Ponzi scheme, &quot;25 Things&quot; fizzled as soon as Facebook ran out of willing participants. Anecdotally, there don't seem to be a lot of people left who are sitting around, waiting to be tagged.</p>
<p>All in all, Facebook infections look remarkably similar to human ones. And like organisms, the odds do seem stacked against all but the fittest of memes. The &quot;Notes&quot; application—including the ability to tags friends—has been a feature of Facebook since August 2006, a Facebook spokeswoman told me on Tuesday. (The PR rep also confirmed that Facebook itself had no part in sparking the trend.) The fact that it took two-and-a-half years for a Notes-based meme to hit it big suggests long odds.</p>
<p>Still, viral marketers might take note of the patterns that &quot;25 Random Things About Me&quot; obeyed. The best hope for someone looking to start a grass-roots craze is to introduce a wide variety of schemes into the wild and pray like hell that one of them evolves into a virulent meme. If evolution is any guide, however, there's no predicting what succeeds and what doesn't. Just look at the platypus.</p>Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:16:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/02/charles_darwin_tagged_you_in_a_note_on_facebook.htmlChris Wilson2009-02-11T23:16:00ZThe evolutionary roots of Facebook's &quot;25 Things&quot; craze.TechnologyEvolution and Facebook's &quot;25 Random Things About Me&quot; craze.2211068Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2211068falsefalsefalseEvolution and Facebook's "25 Random Things About Me" craze.Evolution and Facebook's "25 Random Things About Me" craze.Eyes on&nbsp;FacebookThe 10 Things We Want To Know About &quot;25 Random Things About Me&quot;http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/02/the_10_things_we_want_to_know_about_25_random_things_about_me.html
<p> In the past few weeks, a chain letter called &quot;25 Random Things About Me&quot; has wormed its way through Facebook at an alarming speed. The exhibitionistic format has remained surprisingly intact: In addition to rattling off 25 facts about themselves, &quot;Random Things&quot; authors are supposed to tag 25 of their Facebook friends, prompting them to write their own note and tag 25 more people, and so forth and so on.</p>
<p>Whatever your take is on the content of these notes, they do present a fascinating case study in how trends spread online. As <em>USA Today</em> noted Thursday, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-02-04-facebook-25random_N.htm">it's difficult for Facebook to measure the trend</a> precisely because the letters are written using the generic Notes application, which can be used for any type of message. But a representative for the site did tell the newspaper that use of the Notes app has more than doubled in the past week. </p>
<p>In an attempt to get a handle on how the &quot;25 Random Things About Me&quot; phenomenon began and spread, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> is running a simple survey for Facebook users. If you have written such a letter or noticed that any of your Facebook friends have, please take a second to answer the following questions, using the news feeds on your profile to determine when you were first swept up in this trend. </p>
<p>First, click on Notes in the Applications sidebar to the right of Facebook's front page. (You might need to click on &quot;more&quot; under Applications to reveal the Notes icon or to add the Notes application.) This will give you a list of every note your friends have written. We're interested in the earliest instance of a &quot;25 Things&quot; list. </p>
<p>Once you're done with that, click on the Profile tab at the top of the screen. That will display a list of items that just pertain to you. Here, you can track instances of other people tagging you in their notes.</p>
<p>We're also interested in gleaning information on how the &quot;25 Things&quot; chain began. If you're the man or woman behind the idea or just have a theory you want to share, we'd love to hear from you. Please write down everything you know in the box below or <a href="mailto:slatecontests@gmail.com">send us an e-mail</a> directly. All information you submit via this Web form is anonymous and will be used only in aggregate. If you choose to send us an e-mail, it may be quoted by name unless you stipulate otherwise.</p>
<p>This contest is now closed.</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2210710">`</a></p>Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:40:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2009/02/the_10_things_we_want_to_know_about_25_random_things_about_me.htmlChris Wilson2009-02-06T16:40:00ZA Slate reader survey: What are the origins of the Facebook phenomenon?TechnologyWhat are the origins of Facebook's &quot;25 Random Things About Me&quot; phenomenon?2210697Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2210697falsefalsefalseWhat are the origins of Facebook's "25 Random Things About Me" phenomenon?What are the origins of Facebook's "25 Random Things About Me" phenomenon?Measuring the Palin Effecthttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/10/measuring_the_palin_effect.html
<p> September was a great month to write about politics on the Web. The <em>Los Angeles Times</em> had an all-time-high <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/readers/2008/10/colleagues-were.html">137 million page views last month</a>, the <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=BW&amp;date=20081002&amp;id=9219138">topped 320 million</a>, and both <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/081006/20081006005435.html?.v=1"><strong><em>Slate</em></strong></a> and the <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/10/are-blogs-immun.html">Huffington Post</a> set their own traffic records. It's tempting to give Sarah Palin credit for these new waterlines—she's ubiquitous on every site's most-read lineup, among the <a href="http://www.blogpulse.com/08_10_07/keyPeople.html">most blogged-about people</a> in the country (including celebrities and fictional characters), and far and away the most <a href="http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2008/09/palin_most_searched_for_politi.html">searched-for political figure</a> in America. Then again, September was also a <a href="http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Newspaper-Websites.aspx">great month</a> for newspaper sites in 2006, with Democrats poised to retake both houses of Congress and no spunky Alaska governor on hand. So, how much credit does Palin deserve for driving page views to the media elite she so disdains?</p>
<p>Quite a bit. Even in the midst of other major story lines—total financial catastrophe comes to mind—data from the Web analytics firm <a href="http://www.hitwise.com/">Hitwise</a> suggest a very real Palin Effect. One of the clearest ways to measure this is by focusing on search engines. Slightly more than one-third of Palin search queries drove traffic to news and media sites, according to figures that Hitwise general manager Bill Tancer provided for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>. Fox News received the largest share of these search referrals at 1.12 percent, followed by <em>Time</em> at 0.98 percent. Many other publications received at least 0.1 percent—nothing to shake a stick at, given the torrential interest in Palin.</p>
<p>Knowing this, one can then look for a Palin Effect in the percentage of traffic that publications received from search engines. The spike is unmistakable. In early September, right after McCain announced the Alaska pol as his running mate, the percentage of traffic that Web sites for print publications received from search engines peaked at close to 26 percent, up from about 22 percent the week before and a clear high point for 2008. Broadcast media and other political sites saw a similar jump in the numbers, reversing a downward trend in the proportion of traffic from search engines that Tancer attributes to the increased prominence of blog referrals close to the election.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, Palin continues to reign supreme over the blogosphere. According to Nielsen's BuzzMetrics technology, which tracks mentions of people and topics on blogs, Palin has been the <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3saeug">most blogged-about of the four candidates</a>, ceding her top billing to McCain and Obama only in the days after the two presidential debates. (The BuzzMetrics charts can compare only three items at once, so <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4ksabs">here's one</a> that includes Biden.) </p>
<p>Quantifying the Palin Effect for an individual publication is difficult to do without access to that site's internal tracking figures. We do have those numbers for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>, if not for anyone else. In keeping with the overall trend in news media, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s referrals from search engines for September were the highest for any month this year. Five of our 25 most-read articles in September were explicitly about Palin—the <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2199362/">Sarah Palin FAQ</a> and pieces about her <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2200359/">hacked e-mail account</a>, her <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2199250/">convention speech</a>, her <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2199258/">pregnant daughter</a>, and her <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2199668/">interview with Charles Gibson</a>. Another four were pegged to Palin news: &quot;Explainers&quot; on <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2200155/">whether you can see Russia from Alaska</a> and <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2199492/">music licensing at conventions</a> plus a <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2199318/">&quot;Dear Prudence&quot; column on teen pregnancy</a> and a tribute to the <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2200404/">intrinsic weirdness of Alaska</a>. Those nine articles, which accounted for about 5 percent of <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s September page views, aren't just a symptom of our readers' voracious appetite for election news; only one non-Palin politics story ranked in the top 25. Meanwhile, traffic to <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s &quot;<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/xxfactor/">XX Factor</a>&quot; blog increased by nearly 30 percent last month, when three out of four posts mentioned Palin. </p>
<p>Was Palin solely responsible for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s record traffic? It's a very close call. <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/081006/20081006005435.html?.v=1">87 million page views</a> in September beat the previous record by about 9 million. By my estimates, Palin-related content (including blog posts) pulled in at least 10 million page views. Had McCain gone with a safe, Joe Biden-like choice, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> would have written fewer articles that would have gotten fewer page views. Articles about Palin receive on average several times as many views as articles about Biden, but that doesn't mean those 10 million page views evaporate entirely if Palin turns into, say, Tom Ridge. If we assume even a boring would-be veep recoups a few million views, then <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> still probably would've set a record, but it would've been a very close call. </p>Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:26:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/10/measuring_the_palin_effect.htmlChris Wilson2008-10-09T15:26:00ZIs the Alaska governor responsible for record Web traffic in September?TechnologyIs the Alaska governor responsible for record Web traffic in September?2201942Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2201942falsefalsefalseIs the Alaska governor responsible for record Web traffic in September?Is the Alaska governor responsible for record Web traffic in September?Sarah PalinWhy Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/09/why_is_the_internet_so_infuriatingly_slow.html
<p> Everyone hates their Internet service provider. And with good cause: In the age of ubiquitous Internet access, Web service in America is still often frustratingly slow. Tired of being the villain, telecom companies have assigned blame for this problem to a new bad guy. He's called the &quot;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_hogging">bandwidth hog</a>,&quot; and it's his fault that streaming video on your computer looks more like a slide show than a movie. The major ISPs all <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/23/BU9V11CIVA.DTL&amp;tsp=1">tell a similar story</a>: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth—sometimes more during peak hours. While these &quot;power users&quot; are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load.</p>
<p>The ISPs are certainly correct that there's a problem: The current network in the United States struggles to accommodate everyone, and the barbarians at the gate—voice-over-IP telephony, live video streams, high-def movies—threaten to drown the grid. (This <a href="http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/UK_TMT_Telecoms_Predictions_2007(1).pdf">Deloitte report</a> has a good treatment of that eventuality.) It's less clear that the telecom companies, fixated as they are on the bandwidth hogs, are doing a good job of managing the problem and planning for the future. The ISPs have put forward two big ideas, in recent months, about how to fix our bandwidth crisis. We can arrange these plans into two categories: horrible now and horrible later.</p>
<p><strong>Plan One: Feed the meter. Category: Horrible now. </strong>In January, Time Warner announced it was <a href="http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007055.html">rolling out an experimental plan</a> in Beaumont, Texas, that charged users by the gigabyte. Thirty dollars would get you 5 gigabytes a month, while a $55 plan would get you 40. Each extra gigabyte over the limit costs a buck. In succeeding months, this data-capping idea has caught on. Comcast recently announced that it's <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2008/09/01/daily8.html">drawing the line at 250 gigabytes per user per month</a>. Once you've used that much bandwidth, you can get your account suspended.</p>
<p>A limit of 250 gigs a month&nbsp;is plenty enough for most of us, at least for now. Silicon Alley Insider has a <a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/what_does_comcast_s_250_gigabyte_download_cap_mean_">nice rundown</a> of what it would take to hit that limit, to the tune of two HD movies a day and a lot of gaming on the side.&nbsp;But that assumes your connection is speedy enough to stream high-quality video in the first place.&nbsp;It's a chicken-and-egg problem: People use less bandwidth when their connection is crawling from congestion.</p>
<p>A reasonable argument can be made that this is a sound way to clear up congestion. It is rather unfair that people who barely use the Web have to pay the same or similar rates as people who use BitTorrent all day. The &quot;meterists&quot;—and there <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/03/06/000306opmetcalfe.html">are a few of them</a> <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2319449,00.asp">out there</a>—think systems like Time Warner's are inherently fairer, as they end the practice of forcing light users to subsidize heavy users. The rosiest scenarios even suppose that a pay-as-you-go Internet could give telecoms the financial incentive to expand their networks.</p>
<p>The criticism is easy to condense: No one joyrides in a taxi. A plan like this, as its <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/02/going-medieval-time-warner-begins-metered-bandwidth-testing/">many opponents have noted</a>, will cramp the freewheeling, inventive nature of the Internet. The Internet owes its success to two pillars of human activity: masturbation and procrastination. (Seriously: We have the porn companies to thank for pioneering all sorts of technologies, from VHS to secure credit-card transactions online.) Is the Internet really the Internet if people don't use it to waste time? </p>
<p>Widespread deployment of capped or metered plans would also cripple businesses that have invested in high-bandwidth products, like videoconferencing. And if people start pinching bytes, it could also pose problems for security—if you hear the meter ticking, you'll probably be less eager to install large operating-system updates and new virus-definition files.</p>
<p>Beyond that, capping data transfer is simply a crude way to get people to curb their data appetites. Imposing limits on gigabytes per month is as sensible as replacing speed limits with a total number of miles you can drive in a given day. A more reasonable scenario—though one that's still decidedly unfun—would be to charge for Internet access as we charge for cell phones, running the meter during peak hours and letting people surf and download for free on nights and weekends, when there's far less competition for bandwidth.</p>
<p><strong>Plan Two: Blame BitTorrent. Category: Horrible later. </strong>In addition to capping data transfer, Comcast is taking a second anti-hog initiative. Rather than charging more, the company plans to slow or cut off peer-to-peer traffic during peak times. Last October, the Associated Press caught Comcast <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/">deprioritizing traffic from BitTorrent</a> and other file-sharing protocols. The company received a <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sat-internet-fcc-comcast-aug02,0,1442111.story">slap from the FCC</a> for singling out a specific type of traffic, which violates the FCC's <a href="http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-05-151A1.pdf">policy statement</a> on network management. Comcast <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2328581,00.asp">now says</a> it will pursue a more compliant strategy that slows the connections of power users during peak times without singling out specific types of traffic. This tactic is similar to the more general practice of &quot;traffic shaping&quot;: prioritizing data packets for applications like video that shouldn't lag at the expense of something like e-mail, which can wait in line an extra few seconds without anyone noticing—except that it's deprioritizing users, not data packets. (People who hate the concept of traffic shaping prefer to call this &quot;throttling&quot; or &quot;choking.&quot;)</p>
<p>This plan is &quot;horrible later&quot; because it fails to account for the natural evolution of the Web toward larger file sizes and higher bandwidth activities. While it isn't a God-given right to be able to downloaded pirated DVDs all day long, the ISPs should not adopt a long-term strategy that penalizes high-bandwidth activity. As FCC commissioner <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/27/AR2008072701172.html">Robert M. McDowell pointed out</a> in the <em>Washington Post</em> a few weeks ago, this is not the first time we've reached a crisis level of congestion. If Time Warner and Comcast had structured their networks around anti-bandwidth-hogging policies, say, 20 years ago, revolutionary services like YouTube and BitTorrent might not even exist.</p>
<p>Now let's take a step back and sympathize with the ISPs. On the one hand, power users and Web entrepreneurs brand them as anti-innovation for going after bandwidth hogs with regressive tactics. On the other, there are oodles of home users who get infuriated when it takes forever for a page to load in their browser. On top of that, they have to deal with net-neutrality advocates who often seem more interested in policing the ISPs than in proposing ways to fix our bandwidth crunch (though Columbia law professor and <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> contributor Tim Wu runs down some good possible fixes in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/opinion/30wu.html?_r=1&amp;ref=todayspaper&amp;oref=slogin">this <em>New York Times</em> op-ed</a>). So let's help the ISPs out and look at a few promising technologies that could help us all surf quickly and happily.</p>
<p><strong>The high-fiber diet. </strong>If bandwidth demands do continue to scale, we could get to the point where anyone who wants a decent connection to watch a 100-gigabyte holographic movie—or whatever we're watching five years from now—will have to get a fiber-optic cable directly to their home. Verizon has bet on this solution with its FiOS service. These &quot;fiber to the premises&quot; connections are still very expensive and aren't yet widely deployed—and the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME74lH039zc">commercials</a> also make you want to retrofit your entire neighborhood with copper, just out of spite—but it looks as if they're only getting more necessary. (Some researchers believe that the same technology that may <a href="http://www.photonics.com/content/news/2008/August/11/92819.aspx">someday lead to invisibility cloaks</a> might also be deployed to <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7557280.stm">route fiber-optic signals</a> through today's existing networks. That effort is fairly nascent.)</p>
<p><strong>Cold, hard cache.</strong> Shortly before the start of the 2008 Olympics, some commentators feared the global network wouldn't be able to handle all the demand for streaming Web video. The fact that the Internet didn't &quot;melt,&quot; as <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9593">one ZDNet author feared</a>, set tongues wagging about NBC's use of third-party &quot;content-delivery networks.&quot; To deliver nonlive content, these companies can store popular content on many different servers around the country—a method of ensuring that data packets don't have to travel as far to reach their destination. In general, your machine will retrieve information much faster from a &quot;nearby&quot; server on the network than from one across the globe. If a copy of the movie you want is stored by your ISP on a local server, you'll both get it faster and hold up fewer people in the process. Just as NBC did, companies may need to turn to these content-delivery companies—essentially, large private networks—to help distribute both cached and live content. Still, it feels a little defeatist; taking customers off the public Internet is great for reducing congestion, but the fact that it's necessary is a problem we need to fix head-on, not work around.</p>Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:45:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/09/why_is_the_internet_so_infuriatingly_slow.htmlChris Wilson2008-09-05T11:45:00ZPlus, two horrible things your Internet service provider wants to do to make it speedier.TechnologyWhy is the Internet so infuriatingly slow?2199368Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2199368falsefalsefalseWhy is the Internet so infuriatingly slow?Why is the Internet so infuriatingly slow?The Lazy Man's Guide to Web 2.0http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/08/the_lazy_mans_guide_to_web_20.html
<p> No, I don't want to use Twitter. I'm way too busy—and, let's be honest, too uninterested (and uninteresting)—to spend all day thumb-typing status updates from my cell phone. That's the problem with Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and the rest: They expect me to eagerly upload, type, click, and <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2163861/">tweet</a> my life onto the Internet so these tidbits can be served to others. What I really want is to be able to reap the advantages of these sites without having to lift a finger—to see what my friends are up to without having to write anything myself.</p>
<p>The problem is my friends are spread across dozens of different sites—Picasa, Pownce, Plurk, Pandora, Polyvore—and that's just the Ps. Most of them publish to two or three sites at minimum. Figuring out how to navigate each site is more work than I have time for. My fellow tech pundit Robert Scoble posts movies, photos, and text <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=robert+scoble">to more than a dozen sites</a>. Can't I just get one page that lists everything Scoble did today?</p>
<p>I can! A bunch of former Google employees—techies who worked on Gmail and Google Maps—quit their jobs to start <a href="http://www.friendfeed.com/">FriendFeed</a>, a site that rolls up the output of <a href="http://friendfeed.com/about/faq#services">43 Web 2.0 services</a> onto one auto-generated page. FriendFeed is basically a custom-tailored home page for people who are obsessed with the Internet. They can create their own FriendFeed page, or you can make one for them. Then, on a single page, you can see what videos they're watching, whom they're chatting with, and what pictures they've uploaded. If they add a DVD to their Amazon wish list, you'll be notified. The beauty of FriendFeed is that it's fully automated and requires no prior knowledge of any of the sites it crawls. You give it a name, and it'll take care of the rest. I typed &quot;Robert Scoble&quot; into FriendFeed's search box. Among the results was a thumbnail photo of Always-On Bobby, plus 15 icons representing different sites he'd incorporated into his FriendFeed account. All I needed to do was click the subscribe button once—done! </p>
<p>Now every time I log in to FriendFeed, I get a page that shows what Scoble—and, to my surprise, some of his friends—are doing online. It looks like one long blog page or a supersized version of the Facebook News Feed. There are news stories shared from Google Reader, strips of photo thumbnails from Flickr, Twitter messages, music from iLike, reviews from Yelp, and videos from something called <a href="http://www.seesmic.com/">Seesmic</a>—I don't even know what that is. Nevertheless, it automatically shows up for me. </p>
<p>Facebook and FriendFeed are parallel universes that connect. Facebook is mostly a private estate where you need to log in and can see only content posted by friends who've accepted you. FriendFeed scours the unprotected part of the Internet, letting you grab anything that isn't locked away. I prefer FriendFeed's Spartan single-column format to Facebook's busier layout, which is full of ads and other come-ons. But if you've taken the plunge into Facebook, you can simply read your FriendFeed updates as part of your Facebook News Feed—everything in one place.</p>
<p>One tip: Don't try to read every single entry. Relax. Exhale. Then scroll down the page skimming for anything that grabs your attention. And when a friend asks over e-mail or AIM, &quot;Did you see my post about Steve Jobs today?,&quot; just pop over to FriendFeed and search for Jobs' name in the spew. &quot;Yeah, I did. You really nailed it,&quot; I type back 12 seconds later.</p>
<p>Because it collates everything in reverse chronological order, FriendFeed is also a great way to keep up with the anti-Scobles—friends who post something once a month. When they do, you'll see it minutes later, near the top of your page.</p>
<p>There's another huge unplanned market for FriendFeed: parents. Setting up a single page of all your kids' Internet accounts is a snap. Even if they haven't signed up at FriendFeed, you can do it for them. Click the button to create an &quot;imaginary friend.&quot; Then, click on a service—say, Flickr—and type in your offspring's Flickr user name. FriendFeed goes to Flickr, gets their photo stream, and inserts the pics into your page. Whenever they add a new picture, it'll appear in front of you automatically. Being childless, I used the &quot;imaginary&quot; feature to make photographer Brian Solis and conservative pundit Rachel Marsden my imaginary friends. I can at least pretend to keep great company.</p>
<p>There are two things that separate FriendFeed from the rest of the Web 2.0 pack. First, it doesn't presume I've come to the Internet to get attention rather than pay attention. The site doesn't barrage me with requests to subscribe, upload, or share my own content. Second, it's geared toward one-way relationships rather than the two-way electronic &quot;friendships&quot; you're stuck with on Facebook or MySpace.</p>
<p>I feel the same way about FriendFeed that I did about RSS four years ago, when I gushed about it as a way to <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2096660/">speed-read the Net</a>. FriendFeed is largely built on RSS—that's how it grabs your friends' content from most sites. But it goes a step further by collating all your feeds into one stream of text, photos, and videos and laying everything out in a consistent, browser-friendly format. You don't need to manually find and add each one. You don't have to pore through each one separately to see all of this morning's updates. You don't have to learn to visually parse each site separately—FriendFeed makes them all look pretty much the same. It's the closest thing yet to an Internet Panopticon.</p>
<p>Moreover, if you're the playful type who likes to e-mail your friends URLs, pictures, and videos all day, you should take the extra step of setting up a feed with your name and photo on it, as Scoble did. Then, instead of cursing your every appearance in their inboxes, your inundated colleagues can use FriendFeed to stay on top of your world—but only when they feel like it.</p>Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:12:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/08/the_lazy_mans_guide_to_web_20.htmlPaul Boutin2008-08-06T11:12:00ZFriendFeed crawls Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube so you don't have to.TechnologyFriendFeed crawls Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube so you don't have to.2196209Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2196209falsefalsefalseFriendFeed crawls Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube so you don't have to.FriendFeed crawls Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube so you don't have to.FriendFeedHow To Talk to a Search Enginehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/08/how_to_talk_to_a_search_engine.html
<p>Last Monday morning, the search engine Cuil launched with great fanfare. By Monday afternoon, it had <a href="http://blog.washingtonpost.com/leadership/2008/08/cuils_bad_week.html">completely tanked</a>. Users who test-drove the would-be Google rival were quick to complain about <a href="http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Apps/Cuil-Search-Engine-Triggers-Image-Concerns/">mismatched articles and thumbnail photos</a>; the poor breadth of results; obvious queries that turned up blank; and even, in a moment of true existential crisis, <a href="http://joeduck.com/2008/07/27/cuil-search-engine-fails-to-find-itself/">the site's inability to locate itself</a>.</p>
<p>It's unfair, of course, to judge a new site on its opening-day performance. Still, it's not clear how we <em>should</em> evaluate a new search engine. In the same way that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-dictionary.html">Kurt Vonnegut once proposed</a> that the definitions for <em>ain't</em> and <em>like</em> could identify whether a dictionary was prescriptive or descriptive, it's high time for a quick and dirty litmus test for the Googles (and Cuils) of the world. Last week, I asked readers to come up with some <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2196253/">standard queries that we should use to measure our search engines</a>. I also wanted an explanation of how those questions could be used to reveal each site's philosophy. </p>
<p>For an extremely thorough evaluation of how major search engines measure up against one another, Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz has oodles of <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/comparing-search-engine-performance-how-does-cuill-stack-up-to-google-yahoo-live-ask">tables and charts</a>. But if you prefer a quick and dirty version—a Vonnegut test for the digital age—here are the three searches that I propose. (Beneath each search term are links to the results given by five major search engines. I'm ignoring sponsored links in all cases.)</p>
<p><strong>George W. Bush<br /></strong> <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&amp;hs=7Sm&amp;q=george+w.+bush&amp;btnG=Search">Google</a>, <a href="http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=george+w.+bush&amp;fr=yfp-t-501&amp;toggle=1&amp;cop=mss&amp;ei=UTF-8">Yahoo</a>, <a href="http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=george+w.+bush&amp;go=&amp;form=QBRE">Live</a>, <a href="http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=167&amp;o=0&amp;l=dir&amp;q=george+w.+bush">Ask</a>, <a href="http://www.cuil.com/search?q=George%20W.%20Bush&amp;sl=long">Cuil</a><br />&quot;I tried George W. Bush and got a great view at the different search engines,&quot; writes reader <strong>Jeff Alhadeff</strong>. &quot;Google responds with news, Wikipedia, the White House, his library, and then some links demonstrating his lack of popularity.&nbsp;...Yahoo natural search nearly the same, but lighter on the anti-Bush links. ... Cuil responded with 'We didn't find any results for George W. Bush.'&nbsp;I am still laughing. (I had to run the search without the period after the W.)&quot;</p>
<p>A query for our current president points to an interesting philosophical question for any search engine: Which should be higher in this search, whitehouse.gov or Wikipedia? The former is the president's official site, the latter is the pre-eminent reference site on the Web and considerably more objective. This is an important question of orthodoxy vs. popularity—and one on which not all search engines agree. Of the five search engines considered here, only Google and Yahoo put Wikipedia first. (And for the record, Cuil has resolved its <a href="http://i36.tinypic.com/1zc1xmt.jpg">disagreement with punctuation marks</a>.)</p>
<p><strong>2. Viagra<br /></strong> <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=viagra&amp;btnG=Search">Google</a>, <a href="http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu5xoX5dIyTwAEadXNyoA?p=viagra&amp;y=Search&amp;fr=yfp-t-501&amp;ei=UTF-8">Yahoo</a>, <a href="http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=viagra&amp;go=&amp;form=QBRE">Live</a>, <a href="http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=167&amp;o=0&amp;l=dir&amp;q=viagra">Ask</a>, <a href="http://www.cuil.com/search?q=viagra&amp;sl=long">Cuil</a><br />&quot;Another important factor is checking to see if the engine is resistant to spam,&quot; writes <strong>John King</strong>. &quot;Can spammers get into your index for Viagra keywords?&quot;</p>
<p>How well does a search engine sniff out spam—and when, if ever, are sites that sell ED pills over the Internet legitimate? Of the five engines I tested, only Cuil gives high rankings to results that are clearly spam. Yahoo's first page of results was the most informational, with links to health sites, clinics, and the FDA. Live Search, by contrast, has five first-page links to online pharmacies and other sites hawking the drug.</p>
<p>It's not obvious which approach is correct, though I'm thinking that Live might be on to something. What are people who search for the word <em>Viagra</em> more likely to be after, a site that discreetly sells the drug or a <a href="http://health.howstuffworks.com/viagra.htm">HowStuffWorks article</a> on the mechanics of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_cavernosum_penis">corpora cavernosa</a>? Perhaps search engines are putting propriety in front of the results that users really want.</p>
<p><strong>3. Your Own Name<br /></strong>More than half of everyone who wrote in made the case for a vanity search as the ultimate litmus test, arguing that these are the results with which the average obsessive self-searcher is most familiar. &quot;I am intimately familiar with where my name appears online (everybody's guilty of googling themselves from time to time, or all the time),&quot; writes reader <strong>Caren Beilin</strong>. &quot;I figured typing in my own name would be the quickest way to test out Cuil, since I already had a comprehensive knowledge about my name on the web. As for now, I'd rather google myself than cuil myself.&quot; </p>
<p>While this test is obviously subjective, it does offer clear insights into the balance between two important priorities for any search engine: relevance and freshness. Are the results that come up for oneself more recent, or are they ones that are more vital to your digital legacy?</p>
<p>The vanity search test breaks down for those of us blessed with highly generic names, so I gave it a run on my editor, Josh Levin (putting his name in quote marks for exact matches). Josh <a href="http://www.cuil.com/search?q=”josh levin”&amp;sl=long">fares the best on Cuil</a>, which, unlike all the other search engines, is not squeamish about listing lots of results from the same source; 10 of the 11 front-page results are from <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>. Both <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&amp;hs=vg9&amp;q=”josh+levin”&amp;btnG=Search">Google</a> and <a href="http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=167&amp;o=0&amp;l=dir&amp;q=&quot;josh+levin&quot;">Ask</a> give top billing to <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> articles, while <a href="http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu.MdfZdItzYBzRJXNyoA?p=”josh+levin”&amp;y=Search&amp;fr=yfp-t-501&amp;ei=UTF-8">Yahoo</a> and <a href="http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=”josh+levin”&amp;go=&amp;form=QBRE">Live Search</a> give the No. 1 spot to sites devoted to people of the same name—<a href="http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geu7tZfZdIFlYBZspXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEzYTI1dGRrBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMQRjb2xvA2FjMgR2dGlkA0Y4MjNfMTA0/SIG=11da1r3l8/EXP=1217973977/**http:/www.josh-levin.us/">josh-levin.us</a> and <a href="http://www.joshlevin.com/">joshlevin.com</a>, respectively. </p>
<p>The differences here demonstrate that a search engine has to choose between foregrounding a close match or going with a site with lots of authority. By putting a <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> article as its top result, Google and Ask reveal a bias for authority over closeness. By linking to sites with the keywords in the URLs, Yahoo and Live show a preference for closeness over authority. </p>
<p>Search engines ultimately aspire to produce results that are both intuitive and correct. In the end, your decision about what search engine is right for you may come down to a matter of opinion: Who spews more disinformation, Wikipedia or the White House?</p>Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:08:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/08/how_to_talk_to_a_search_engine.htmlChris Wilson2008-08-04T20:08:00ZThree queries to help decide if Google or Cuil or Ask is right for you.TechnologyThree questions to ask your search engine.2196492Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2196492falsefalsefalseThree questions to ask your search engine.Three questions to ask your search engine.The Search Engine Litmus Testhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/07/the_search_engine_litmus_test.html
<p> In a 1966 review of the new <em>Random House Dictionary</em>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1966/10/30/books/vonnegut-dictionary.html?pagewanted=print">Kurt Vonnegut wrote</a> that the key to understanding a new dictionary was to &quot;look up ain't and like.&quot; These two definitions are the quickest way, Vonnegut promises us, to determine whether a dictionary is &quot;descriptive&quot; or &quot;prescriptive&quot;—if it explains how language is used or if it decrees how it ought to be.</p>
<p>Nowadays, not so many people use dictionaries—why bother when you can look up the definition online? Vonnegut's idea is no less relevant today, though. Monday's launch of <a href="http://www.cuil.com/">Cuil</a>, the latest search engine gunning for Google, brings us to this question: What queries can you give a search engine to quickly expose its strengths and weaknesses?</p>
<p><strong><em>Slate</em></strong> wants your suggestions on the most useful queries that, when given to a variety of search engines, neatly show the differences between them. To borrow an example from my<strong><em></em></strong> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2193837/">review of Powerset</a>, the phrase &quot;Who shot John Lennon?&quot; demonstrates the semantic search engine's ability to answer simple questions better than Google; more conventional queries usually favor the incumbent. Or, to take another approach, perhaps a given keyword returns pages on one search engine that another refuses to crawl altogether. </p>
<p>When you send us your search queries, make sure to include your thoughts on what the results reveal about Google, Cuil, Ask, etc. Different engines prioritize results in different ways, based on notions of a page's authority, usefulness, or popularity. Like dictionaries, does this make some search engines descriptive and others prescriptive? Or are those terms out of date? If so, send us some new ones.</p>
<p>Please post your submissions to the Fray or send them to <a href="mailto:slate.search@gmail.com">slate.search@gmail.com</a>. E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Entries will be compiled for a future column.</p>Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:16:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2008/07/the_search_engine_litmus_test.htmlChris Wilson2008-07-29T11:16:00ZHow do we know if a Google competitor is any good? A Slate reader contest.TechnologyHow do we know if a new search engine is any good?2196253Chris WilsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2196253falsefalsefalseHow do we know if a new search engine is any good?How do we know if a new search engine is any good?Web 2.0http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/03/web_20.html
<p> </p>
<p><em>Newsweek</em>'s April 3 <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/">cover story</a> finally gives checkout-stand placement to &quot;Web 2.0,&quot; everyone's favorite new tech buzzword. You've probably seen the phrase before—in <a href="http://techcrunch.com/">the blogosphere</a>, in the <em>New York Times</em>' coverage of dot-com executives seeking a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/technology/22VALL.html">second act</a>, or in <em>Wired</em>'s<em></em>profile of <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/oreilly.html">Tim O'Reilly</a>, the tech publisher who envisions a Net that entices us to contribute as well as consume. But like its predecessors, the <em>Newsweek</em> story pussyfoots around the most important question about Web 2.0: What the hell is it?</p>
<p>O'Reilly began touting the phrase in 2003. But even the man who holds an annual Web 2.0 Conference <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition.html">runs into trouble</a> when pressed for a snappy, dictionary-style definition:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an &quot;architecture of participation,&quot; and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Got all that?</p>
<p>The problem isn't O'Reilly's hard-to-understand enthusiasm. It's that other people use Web 2.0 to mean different, often conflicting things. There are at least three incompatible definitions floating around. For O'Reilly, Web 2.0 is a mishmash of tools and sites that foster collaboration and participation. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.myspace.com/">MySpace</a>, Wikipedia, and the entire blogosphere are examples. You don't buy stuff from them—you use them to share digital assets and link up with other people. Podcasting is a Web 2.0 technology, because it's almost as easy to <a href="http://www.macworld.com/2005/04/secrets/junecreate/index.php">create a podcast</a> as to listen to one. The more time you put into a Web 2.0 site—tagging photos, posting comments, editing wiki entries—the better it works for everyone. One blogger <a href="http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/09/web_20_is_made_.html">wisecracked</a> that, like Soylent Green, &quot;Web 2.0 is made of people!&quot;</p>
<p>Web developers use Web 2.0 a second way, to refer to the software and languages used to build the gee-whiz features of these sites. <a href="http://www.clearnova.com/ajax/">Ajax</a>, <a href="http://www.tagcloud.com/">tag clouds</a>, and wikis are basic components of many collaborative sites. In general, Web 2.0 tools are free, easy to master, and easy to interconnect. Google Maps + Wikipedia = <a href="http://www.placeopedia.com/">Placeopedia</a>! But the definition runs aground when Web 2.0 technologies power <a href="http://www.gap.com/">Gap.com</a>, an impressive but collaboration-free shopping experience. &quot;Ajax without participation doesn't make for Web 2.0,&quot; O'Reilly explained to me. A pitch-weary investor told <em>Newsweek, </em>&quot;When people say to me it's a Web 2.0 application, I want to puke.&quot; </p>
<p>A third definition gets thrown around in Silicon Valley. A &quot;Web 2.0 play&quot; is a bid to make money by funding a bring-your-own-content site. It's a long-shot but low-risk investment that could become the next Google. Or at least the next thing Google buys. No warehouses full of inventory, no sprawling staff, no NASA-grade supply chain management systems. <a href="http://www.dodgeball.com/">Dodgeball</a> and <a href="http://www.digg.com/">Digg</a> are good examples of popular sites started on a shoestring.<strong></strong>Google snapped up Dodgeball last year; Digg's imminent acquisition is a <a href="http://businesslogs.com/technology/a_digg_acquisition__running_the_numbers.php">foregone conclusion</a> among valley wags. <em>Newsweek</em> quotes a Yahoo! exec on why they bought Flickr: &quot;With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content. That's a neat trick.&quot; But buyout-hungry entrepreneurs now slap the 2.0 moniker willy-nilly on mobile services and browser applications that are neither built on Ajax nor made of people.</p>
<p>Beyond that, publicists and self-promoters invoke Web 2.0 whenever they want to tag something as new, cool, and undiscovered—&quot;This could be a big story for you, Paul!&quot; That kind of hucksterism is what sends editors reaching for their red pens. Prior to <em>Newsweek</em>'s feature, the term &quot;Web 2.0&quot; only appeared in national publications wrapped in protective <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/opinion/18battelle.html?ex=1289970000&amp;en=24406e5d4b2c0bed&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss">quote marks</a><strong></strong>or cordoned off behind phrases like &quot;what some in Silicon Valley are calling.&quot; Before <em>Newsweek</em> released the word, Kong-like, from its restraining quotes, they braced readers with a long disclaimer: &quot;The generic term for this movement, especially among the hundreds of new companies jamming the waiting rooms of venture-capital offices, is Web 2.0, but that's misleading. …&quot;</p>
<p>The salesmanship that surrounds Web 2.0 is the key to understanding what the phrase <em>really</em> means. The new generation of dot-com entrepreneurs confers 2.0 status upon everything because they missed out on the boom times of Web 1.0. They want a new round of buzz and bling for themselves, and who can blame them? Crawling your way up the ladder at eBay is the loser track. A winner creates eBay 2.0. And they're right to be stoked about the Web again. Investors are emerging from hibernation, tech jobs are coming back from Bangalore, and online services have evolved to the point where <em>Wired</em>'s<em></em>most <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html">preposterous scenarios</a> from 10 years ago now look mundane.</p>
<p>But there's no way this bubble—if there is a new bubble—will be anything like the last one. No one will forecast that the Dow will reach 30,000. (Well, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1893958701/002-1346922-9987248?v=glance&amp;n=283155">almost no one</a>.) No one will claim that Web 2.0 makes the concept of the nation-state obsolete. And no matter how much money everyone makes, no one will throw a $10 million launch party for at least the next 50 years.</p>
<p>The only way that 2.0 fits the current Web is if you use the original meaning. It's a technology upgrade, one that finally does what they'd said version 1.0 would do. For a contrived neologism, at least it's catchy. Compare Web 2.0 to other attempts to brand the zeitgeist: &quot;Do It Together,&quot; &quot;The Read/Write Web,&quot; &quot;Small Pieces, Loosely Joined,&quot; or <em>Newsweek</em>'s pick, &quot;the Living Web.&quot; Imagine asking your boss for $3,000 to go to the Living Web Conference.</p>
<p>Still, the purpose of words is to convey meaning. Calling <a href="http://www.technorati.com/">Technorati</a> a &quot;Web 2.0 search engine&quot; sounds sharp but explains nothing. If you can only describe a word by examples, skip to the examples instead: &quot;It's a search engine for blogs that uses tags, like Flickr.&quot; There's an easy way to describe today's online culture of participation without invoking Web 2.0 at all. Just call it the Internet. That way, everyone will know what you mean.</p>Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:38:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/03/web_20.htmlPaul Boutin2006-03-29T19:38:00ZThe new Internet &quot;boom&quot; doesn't live up to its name.TechnologyWeb 2.0 doesn't live up to its name.2138951Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2138951falsefalsefalseWeb 2.0 doesn't live up to its name.Web 2.0 doesn't live up to its name.Slate Has 8 Million Readers, Honesthttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/02/slate_has_8_million_readers_honest.html
<p><em> Madea's Family Reunion</em> took <a href="http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/entertainment/13968783.htm">first place at the weekend box office</a>, racking up $30,250,000. No one sat down and counted the money, of course. The seemingly meticulous numbers are just <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2133482/">estimates</a>. Likewise for <em>Lost</em>'s Nielsen ratings, Howard Stern's Arbitron scores, and Beyonc&eacute;'s No. 1 spot on <em>Billboard</em>'s Hot 100. All these are educated guesses, but executives believe in the figures enough to hire and fire over them. Fox canceled <em>Arrested Development</em> because of its low Nielsens, while <em>Madea's Family Reunion 2</em> has probably been greenlighted already.</p>
<p>There's only one media-ratings system no one takes seriously: Web site rankings. You never see Harvey Weinstein on <em>Entertainment Tonight </em>telling viewers not to believe the latest box-office tallies. But confront any Internet mogul with the numbers published by the two big Web ratings houses, Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix, and you're in for an earful about how they're wrong, wrong, wrong.</p>
<p>Web publishers are so confident about this because they have their own numbers. A site's internal log files track every single page served, and to where. When publishers compare these internal counts against third-party ratings, they usually conclude that Nielsen and comScore's official rankings are too low. If nothing else, the two companies are often way out of sync. My fellow <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> scribe Adam L. Penenberg pondered this &quot;<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65240,00.html">fuzzy math</a>&quot; last year. Nielsen measured Wired News' audience at 1.096 million, while comScore reported an equally precise-sounding 1.87 million. Which was right, Penenberg wondered—1 million, 2 million, or neither?</p>
<p>It's obvious why nobody trusts site rankings—the &quot;official&quot; numbers from Nielsen and comScore are often so far apart that you couldn't trust them even if you wanted to. But site owners have a real stake in these numbers. Advertisers use them to decide where to spend their budgets, and the inconsistent counts make buyers wary. So, if Web moguls think the published statistics are inaccurate, why don't they just release their own numbers? They will—if you're a prospective advertiser on the phone. Otherwise, they prefer to keep house stats under wraps because they see them as competitive info. </p>
<p><strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s publisher Cliff Sloan has given me permission to share the numbers from our internal traffic report for December. (<strong><em>Slate</em></strong> <a href="http://surfaid.dfw.ibm.com/web/home/">licenses software from IBM</a> that compiles monthly, weekly, and daily traffic reports.) The chart below, which compares <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s numbers to those from Nielsen and comScore, shows two different metrics for looking at site traffic:</p>
<p><strong>Page views</strong> are the number of individual Web pages the site served. If one person reads a three-page story, that's three page views. If you reload or revisit the page later, that's another page view. Publishers use this number to measure available inventory for advertisers, who typically pay based on how many times their ads will be shown.</p>
<p><strong>Unique visitors</strong> are the number of people who looked at the site. If you look at the <strong><em>Slate</em></strong><em></em>home page at home and at work, that counts as two page views but only one unique visitor. Publishers use this number to give advertisers an idea of the site's &quot;reach&quot;—that is, how many people might see an ad. </p>
<p>Nielsen and comScore agree on <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s audience for the month, but the rest of the measurements are far apart.</p>
<p></p>
<div>
<table width="444">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td colspan="1" width="78" rowspan="1">&nbsp;</td>
<td colspan="1" rowspan="1">Nielsen//NetRatings</td>
<td colspan="1" width="95" rowspan="1">comScore Media Metrix</td>
<td colspan="1" width="87" rowspan="1">Slate internal report</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="1" width="78" rowspan="1"><strong>Unique Visitors</strong></td>
<td colspan="1" rowspan="1">4,600,000</td>
<td colspan="1" width="95" rowspan="1">4,609,000</td>
<td colspan="1" width="87" rowspan="1">8,051,709 unique browsers</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="1" width="78" rowspan="1"><strong>pageviews</strong></td>
<td colspan="1" rowspan="1">40,900,000</td>
<td colspan="1" width="95" rowspan="1">27,000,000</td>
<td colspan="1" width="87" rowspan="1">61,089,137</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p>Why the different numbers? For one thing, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s 8 million browsers came from all over the world. Nielsen and comScore count only U.S. visitors, the ones most of our advertisers are trying to reach. </p>
<p>While <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s stats come straight from the server logs, Nielsen and comScore employ panelists who get modest compensation to install tracking software on their computers. The companies use different formulas to extrapolate total traffic from their panel measurements.</p>
<p>There are problems with both methodologies. Notice that <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> counts unique <em>browsers</em> instead of unique visitors. It's easy to count browsers by tagging each one with a <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2129656/">cookie</a>. But if the same person uses one browser at home and another at work, that will cause an overcount. You get an undercount if the same browser is used by more than one person. You can only guess roughly how many surfers have deleted or disabled their cookies, which can scramble the count both ways. And some unknown number of browsers aren't people, but robots crawling sites to index them for search engines or price-comparison sites. (Google identifies itself, but some content-scrapers deliberately camouflage themselves to avoid being blocked.) </p>
<p>Altogether these factors usually add up to massive overcounting—in this case, 8 million browsers instead of 4 million unique visitors. Web publishers swap notes with each other and apply their own math to adjust for multibrowser users and cookie haters, but the result is an approximation rather than a straight count. <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> subscribes to NetRatings' advanced client reports for a second opinion.</p>
<p>The ratings companies, for their part, can't accurately measure people surfing from universities, government agencies, and large corporations. That's because many such places prohibit workers from installing the tracking software. Academics, government workers, and corporate professionals—that sounds like a good chunk of <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s core readership. This undercounting makes for a good argument that Nielsen and comScore are undercounting sites like <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>. (Nielsen tries to even out the work-surfing numbers by conducting random-dial phone surveys, while comScore solicits a larger panel—120,000 to Nielsen's 28,000.) </p>
<p> The two agencies agree on the number of <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s December visitors, but the results weren't so cozy for the top news sites. (To compare the Nielsen and comScore ratings for the Net's top five news sites, <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2136937">click here</a>.)</p>
<p>As for page views, it's common to hear publishers say—off the record, of course— that they have twice the traffic estimated by Nielsen. CNN and Fox execs recently <a href="http://www.observer.com/20060213/20060213_rebecca_dana_pageone_nytv.asp">made such claims</a> to the <em>New York Observer.</em> In this case, you should believe the publishers. Rather than extrapolating from a sample, they log every single page request made to their servers and subtract the ones they don't think are valid (like robots or their own staff). They might adjust the count up for subscribers who read by e-mail, and adjust down for slide shows that rack up a dozen page-views for one article. They use the results to decide what topics are hot, which writers bring in a lot of readers, and whether slide shows are worth the effort. It's in the publishers' interest to get their page-view counts right, and they've got the server logs to do it.</p>
<p>If you're not an ad buyer, you probably only care how many readers a site has. That requires a unique-visitor count, where it's in the publisher's interest to exaggerate their reach to sway potential advertisers. Nielsen and comScore don't offer NASA-grade precision, but they're the most studiously calculated numbers available and the most consistent means to compare one site against another. How do you reconcile the factor-of-two difference between their Wired News counts? You accept the awkward truth: We aren't sure of the right answer, but we're closing in on it. </p>
<p>Penenberg called this &quot;flying blind.&quot; I take the opposite view: It's transparency, one of the Net's basic strengths. Conflicting traffic reports confuse ad buyers, but they also give them more clues about where their money is really going. Mismatched ratings drive Web publishers crazy, but they can (and do) call Nielsen and comScore on the carpet to reconcile their methods against internal counts. I'm sure Harvey Weinstein can put the screws to the box-office people when he doesn't believe them, but he can't hit them with 25 terabytes of server logs.</p>
<p>The more I dig into how Web ratings work, the more I realize people in other media are in denial. Internet publishing is the most finely measurable medium ever invented; broadcast, movie, and print companies have no way of monitoring individual transactions from their end. Yet, while the Web guys admit they could be off by half, Nielsen claims its television ratings have a margin of error of&nbsp; <a href="http://www.nielsenmedia.com/whatratingsmean/">4 percent</a>. If I were in the cast of <em>Arrested Development</em>, I'd demand a recount.</p>Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:32:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/02/slate_has_8_million_readers_honest.htmlPaul Boutin2006-02-27T21:32:00ZOr maybe it's 4 million. Which should you believe?TechnologyHow many readers does Slate really have?2136936Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2136936falsefalsefalseHow many readers does Slate really have?How many readers does Slate really have?Confessions of a Bedroom Filmmakerhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/02/confessions_of_a_bedroom_filmmaker.html
<p> I love the idea of making movies, but actually doing it can be so … taxing. Last year, I heard about <a href="http://www.machinima.com/">machinima</a> —a catchall term for 3-D animated movies made with video games and consumer PCs. Bedroom auteurs repurpose games like <a href="http://www.machinima.com/films.php?engine=8">Halo</a> and <a href="http://www.sims99.com/">The Sims 2</a> to make movies that have little or nothing to do with the games themselves. The moviemaking techniques differ widely from game to game. For example, the makers of <em> <a href="http://rvb.roosterteeth.com/home.php">Red vs. Blue</a></em>, the most successful machinima series around, devise a storyline, record dialogue and sound effects, then connect four Xboxes and start playing Halo 2. They then save their characters' moves as digital video and edit the footage on their computers using Adobe Premiere. In a few hours, they've got a finished product. (You can read more about the techniques used to make machinima <a href="http://www.machinima.org/faq.html">here</a>.)</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.cyndigreening.com/stories/2005/02/26/sundance2005MachinimaPanel.html">Sundance</a>, <a href="http://www.ifctv.com/ifc/what?CAT0=45&amp;CAT1=6506&amp;TZ=ET&amp;TB=4&amp;CLR=blue&amp;BCLR=00A8EC&amp;AID=13147">IFC</a>, and <a href="http://www.mtv2.com/#series/13696">MTV2</a> have all dabbled in machinima. Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and George&nbsp;Lucas have supposedly experimented with it, too. If it's good enough for them, I thought, it's good enough for an easily discouraged DIY visionary like me.</p>
<p>I started my first machinima experiment by buying The Sims 2. It's an open-ended game that allows you to manage the lives of many different characters, down to choosing their personalities, wardrobe, and looks. Once you've created your characters, you can influence their actions by clicking on a little bubble that floats above them. Best of all, you have access to multiple controllable cameras, and recording your footage to a file on your hard drive is as easy as pushing a button.</p>
<p>There's only one problem: Making machinima with The Sims is often less like directing than running a day care center. Directors can tell actors what to do; in The Sims, I had trouble keeping them in the room. I started by creating three characters: an old man, a young woman, and a baby. I wanted the old man to be the dad, but for some reason the game forced me to make him the baby's roommate. Soon, I lost track of my &quot;actors.&quot; (Whirling through the sets with the freely moving camera made me so dizzy that I almost threw up.) When I found them again, the baby was bawling on the bathroom floor. The woman was ignoring the baby and playing slap-hands with his roommate—while dying of hunger. Not only did my movie suck, I was close to murdering my cast.</p>
<p>I discovered later that I could have solved a lot of my problems by turning off my Sims' &quot;free will.&quot; (That would have at least stopped the game of slap-hands.) But even if I could transform the characters into my zombie slaves, The Sims still wouldn't have been for me. The game's sitcom-like aesthetic and bland contemporary interiors just aren't inspiring.</p>
<p>At this point, I pushed away my virtual director's chair. I was ready to give up on machinima for good. But in January, I heard about <a href="http://movies.lionhead.com/movies">The Movies</a>, a new game from legendary designer Peter Molyneux. The object is to build your own movie studio—you hire actors, directors, and crew, and shoot and edit animated movies while watching the action on simulated sets. Actors are temperamental and tend toward obesity and alcoholism; you can keep them happy with a plush trailer or rehabilitate them with detox and liposuction (the disturbing process leaves them covered in bandages). Running a studio is difficult. Buildings deteriorate, paparazzi proliferate, and dollar bills burn up and waft into the air when you spend money. </p>
<p>Don't care about any of that studio-building stuff? Enter &quot;sandbox&quot; mode, which allows you to sidestep the game and focus on movie-making. Unlike The Sims and other video games employed by machinima hackers, The Movies gives you all the tools you need to make films inside the game world. It's easy to record voice actors, and there are built-in sound effects and music. You can also use a variety of prefabricated costumes, settings, actions, facial expressions, and camera angles. Unlike in The Sims, you have access to an in-game editing tool. When you're done with your movie, just click on a button, and <em>voil&agrave;</em>—your movie is ready for posting on <a href="http://movies.lionhead.com/movies">The Movies' Web site</a>, along with thousands of others. </p>
<p> <a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/media/2006/02/79_060220_wh_kissgoodbye110.asf"><em>Kiss Goodbye</em></a> Inspired by gems such as Alex Chan's <em> <a href="http://movies.lionhead.com/movie/11520">The French Democracy</a></em> and atomasmelendo's <em> <a href="http://movies.lionhead.com/movie/46006">Earth Visit</a></em>, I set to work. The Movies' list of suggested titles is evocative—someday I hope to make <em>The Fen Tiger, Dude, I Got My Head Stuck!</em>, and <em>Gary Maugan, Anagram Guy</em>—but, sadly, there are no tigers or fens in the game. With no particular plan in mind, I started fine-tuning costumes, choosing sets, and selecting scenes from the game's library. Before I knew it, I had spent five hours happily spooking myself with <em>Kiss Goodbye</em>, a three-minute ghost story.</p>
<p>The Movies makes it easy for anyone to become a computer-game filmmaker. The tradeoff for this ease of use is that the game isn't as flexible as I'd hoped. Instead of framing camera angles and pressing &quot;record,&quot; I had to select from a variety of prerecorded scenes—like &quot;campfire chat&quot; and &quot;admire baby.&quot; Once I settled on a scene, I dragged in my characters in place of the game's faceless mannequins. By moving a slider, I could control their expressions (often restricted to happy, sad, or angry), how fast the action unfolded, and whether the camera was close or far away. Certain things like gestures and sounds changed every time I played my movie in &quot;post-production&quot; mode, which made the process like playing roulette—I got the exact laugh I wanted perhaps one out of three times. Most annoying of all, once I started the frequently frustrating editing process, I couldn't go back and reshoot without losing the edits I had already made.</p>
<p>Sure, I got annoyed when I couldn't make the main character pick up a baby—the closest I could get was &quot;pick up weapon.&quot; The game also wouldn't allow me to cast children or people over 65, set a scene in a school, or have a sex scene. But I learned to accept these limitations. Besides, where else could I have made an actor wear a medieval ghost costume, turn translucent, escape a bombed-out city, kiss a skeleton, and then vanish?</p>
<p>Is it possible to make a masterpiece with The Movies? As long as you play to the game's strengths. Because of the characters' limited facial expressions and gestures, it would be hard to pull off a <em> <a href="http://coffeeandcigarettesmovie.com/">Coffee and Cigarettes</a></em>-style series of conversational vignettes. It makes more sense to use the program to film a sci-fi epic. The well-stocked arsenal of sets, costumes, and weapons does make it easy to tell a story that would be almost impossible for an amateur to film in the real world.</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/media/2006/02/82_060220_wh_blunderbus110.asf"><em>The Blunderbus</em></a> Based on these observations, I humbly submit the plot for the perfect machinima for The Movies. In a future where human cloning is taken for granted, a sisterhood of cloned, post-collegiate women pursue time-traveling aliens using badass weapons that sound different from scene to scene. During a massive showdown, an alien and a clone woman share a romantic moment involving the briefest of touches. Consequently, the clone convinces her sisters to drop their guns. The two warring factions shake hands and declare a truce. Or, if that doesn't work, there's always <em>Gary Maugan, Anagram Guy vs. the Dude Who Got His Head Stuck</em>.</p>Tue, 21 Feb 2006 18:43:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/02/confessions_of_a_bedroom_filmmaker.htmlBidisha Banerjee2006-02-21T18:43:00ZHow I learned to love making movies on my computer.TechnologyConfessions of a housebound filmmaker.2136711Bidisha BanerjeeWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2136711falsefalsefalseConfessions of a housebound filmmaker.Confessions of a housebound filmmaker.A screenshot from Banerjee's first machinima film, Kiss GoodbyeAm I Too Old To Learn a New Language?http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/02/am_i_too_old_to_learn_a_new_language.html
<p>Small children do many things better than adults. My 5-year-old son is better at getting attention from women than I am, he is better at falling asleep in improbable places, and he is better at getting his way. But there's one skill every small child has that adults rightly envy: They're brilliant language-learners. Any kid, with no formal instruction whatsoever, is capable of near-perfect pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar in a language that was utterly foreign to them not long before. Even the best teenage or adult foreign-language students sound clunky by contrast. </p>
<p>There is a software package, though, that promises to make us all kids again. <a href="http://www2.rosettastone.com/en">Rosetta Stone</a>, which is now being marketed massively in airports, bookstores, and high-end magazines, represents an unusual approach to language-learning. Rosetta Stone uses no English-language instruction—in fact, no instruction at all. There are no vocabulary lists, conjugation tables, or translation drills. Instead, it mimics language immersion by associating language with pictures. Rosetta Stone doesn't put it this way, but the program asks you to learn like a child. </p>
<p>Rosetta Stone software is available for 28 different languages, from Spanish to Swahili. I tested out the Danish version. It's a language of moderate difficulty for English speakers, but since it's a Germanic language—a cousin to English—its vocabulary and grammar are not as distant as, say, Chinese. I know German, so it could give me a bit of help, but Danish and German aren't close enough to make it too easy. And I hoped to surprise my visiting Danish girlfriend. (If you want to play along, check out this <a href="http://www2.rosettastone.com/en/individuals/demo">free demo</a>. You can purchase either an online or home version of the Rosetta Stone software. The Danish course I tested costs $195. Alternately, a one-month subscription is $49.95, and three months will set you back $89.95.)</p>
<p> The interface is incredibly simple. A written word appears and is pronounced by a native speaker. The user picks a matching picture from four images below. A correct answer gives a pleasing chime and a check mark. A wrong answer brings a muted air horn of disapproval and a red X. Other drills are similar. Sometimes you see the picture and choose from four written words; sometimes you choose from four spoken words. The key is that from the first exercise, you don't associate &quot;flyvemaskine&quot; with the English &quot;airplane.&quot; You immediately associate &quot;flyvemaskine&quot; with an actual airplane, cutting out the mind-cluttering step of translation.</p>
<p>You will be surprised how quickly you learn words even in a difficult language. After 20 minutes with Lesson 1, I walked down the street and found myself saying &quot;car,&quot; &quot;cat,&quot; &quot;dog,&quot; &quot;boy,&quot; and &quot;woman&quot; in my new language. After basic words, Rosetta Stone starts teaching basic relationships. &quot;A car and a cat.&quot; &quot;A boy in a car.&quot; &quot;A boy on a table.&quot; Then come a few verbs. Instead of being given grammar lessons, you are deriving the grammar from your linguistic stimulus—as a child does. (Don't hold your breath on perfect pronunciation, though. Unless you have a good microphone and are very patient, the bit of software that tests your accent against a native's is erratic and frustrating (at least on my computer).</p>
<p>But the Rosetta Stone approach has its drawbacks. Page 1 of the typical language book goes like this: </p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Pierre&nbsp;: Bonjour. Je m'appelle Pierre.<br /></em><em>Mary: Bonjour. Je m'appelle Mary. Je suis am&eacute;ricaine. <br /></em><em>Pierre</em><em>: Enchant&eacute;.</em><em>&nbsp;</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Lesson 1 stuff is obviously useful—if you want to deploy your new language, the first step is greeting people. While Rosetta Stone's initial vocabulary list includes &quot;elephant,&quot; &quot;airplane,&quot; and &quot;boat,&quot; it doesn't have &quot;hello.&quot; Each lesson focuses on grammar building blocks, and there is no time for pleasantries. After maybe a dozen hours with Rosetta Stone, I have a vocabulary of about 200 words. I can say, &quot;The man is wearing a white shirt and the women are wearing black coats.&quot; I can't say &quot;I&quot; or &quot;you.&quot; I can tell my girlfriend, &quot;There is not a man on top of that house,&quot; and, &quot;the yellow car is bigger than the red car.&quot; I can't ask, &quot;Are you hungry?&quot;</p>
<p>Granted, if you're doing well with basic grammar, it's not hard to pick up &quot;How are you?&quot; The bigger problem with Rosetta Stone is that the picture sets and grammar lessons are the same across all languages. Considering that verbs are fiendishly difficult in one language, adjectives tricky in another, and prepositions a pain in a third, this can be problematic. <u><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2120258/">Arabic</a></u>, for example, has a dual number, meaning you have to learn different forms for &quot;he walks,&quot; &quot;they [two people] walk,&quot; and &quot;they [more than two people] walk.&quot; But there is no lesson for this in Rosetta Stone. If you're learning Arabic and don't know there is a dual, you'll wonder why the verbs change from picture to picture, not knowing to think about the number of people. </p>
<p>Rosetta Stone's head of marketing acknowledged that the program can't encompass every facet of every language. But he argues that Rosetta Stone is still the fastest way to get you away from a computer. It's mostly a confidence thing—typical language-learners get tripped up by embarrassment, not lack of skill. Rosetta Stone's technique, if a bit tedious sometimes, makes it so you almost can't <em>help</em> but learn. The constant repetition, starting with basic nouns and building with tiny, accumulating lessons, makes it different from a program that tries to get you communicating straight away.</p>
<p>No computer program can change the fact that, for whatever reason, learning a language is hard for adults. Rosetta Stone seeks to emulate a child's learning, but it's possible that the brain has changed to make this much harder as an adult. In<em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060958332/">The Language Instinct</a></em>, Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker guesses this is because learning language was evolutionarily necessary only in childhood. The brain is a metabolic hog that uses a disproportionate share of the calories we consume—it doesn't make sense to keep around equipment, like the language-learning circuitry, that we won't need later on. </p>
<p>Rosetta Stone will help you build vocabulary and confidence, but it's best used alongside traditional tools like the dreaded <em>Je m'appelle Pierre</em>. Children have a supple language instinct. Adults need to rely on their advantage in cognitive horsepower. </p>Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:33:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/02/am_i_too_old_to_learn_a_new_language.htmlRobert Lane Greene2006-02-06T21:33:00ZA computer immersion program tries to teach me Danish.TechnologyAm I too old to learn a language?2135348Robert Lane GreeneWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2135348falsefalsefalseAm I too old to learn a language?Am I too old to learn a language?The Translator's Blueshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/01/the_translators_blues.html
<p>I work at a large international organization translating speeches from French, Spanish, and Russian. When a rumor began spreading in my office that our jobs were to be &quot;supplemented&quot; by computer translation software, we mostly laughed it off. </p>
<p>Anybody who's played around with translation software knows how bad the technology can be. Everyone in my office knows the hoary classic in which &quot;The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,&quot; translated into Russian and back, comes out &quot;The vodka is good, but the steak is lousy.&quot; We all knew, or thought we knew, that computer translation—also known as machine translation, or MT—could never replace a human translator, with his vast cultural and linguistic experience, his ear for nuance, and his superior multilingual education. We all slept very well in the certainty of our indispensability. </p>
<p>Still, machine translation has been in development for almost 60 years, since it was conceived as an offshoot of the cryptographic technology developed during World War II. Grandiose prophecies of its perfectibility have been made ever since. Had MT evolved while I hadn't been paying attention? Had it really improved to the extent that it could be a viable alternative to the human touch? In my off hours, I did a little research.</p>
<p>The first thing I found out, to my alarm, is that the machine translation industry is now pulling in something like $8 billion a year globally, and growing fast. For clients in national intelligence, MT research now represents a potential magical fix for the shortfall of Arabic translators. One developer, Language Weaver, has clients in the Department of Defense and law enforcement who pay anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 for its software. If our leaders, in their infinite wisdom, have tapped translation software to defend our country, maybe my job wasn't quite as secure as I'd thought.</p>
<p>To put my mind at ease, I tried a simple experiment. I found a useful sample of text available in multiple languages: the Vatican's online biography of Pope Benedict XVI. I took one simple sentence—&quot;His youthful years were not easy&quot;—from each of the five foreign-language versions available on the <a href="http://www.vatican.va/">Vatican Web site</a> and ran it through eight translation programs, ranging from basic free software to expensive professional versions.</p>
<p>That might seem pretty straightforward, yet even this simple sentence caused insuperable problems for most of the programs tested. A lot of the free translation software, such as <a href="http://babelfish.altavista.com/">Babel Fish</a> and <a href="http://www.worldlingo.com/en/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html">World Lingo</a>, was not able to recognize the Italian word for &quot;youth,&quot; instead returning something along the lines of &quot;The time of its giovinezza has not been easy.&quot; Systran, a so-called professional program, had the same problem. Perhaps the funniest was InterTran's contribution: &quot;Not she was soft does the stop at time of the her youth.&quot; If they could do that to the pope, what would they do to Proust? And how could they ever hope to take on Osama? </p>
<p>The one that stood out from the pack was Language Weaver. Not only did it recognize the subject as a human being—&quot;The period of his youth was not easy&quot;—but it translated the rest of the paragraph with only one minor error. Intrigued, I began to put the software through its paces. A headline from <em>El Pais</em>: &quot;A wave of attacks left more than 100 dead in several cities in Iraq.&quot; So far, so good. A speech from the United Nations: &quot;The problem is to maintain the level of international attention and ensure the implementation of the commitments.&quot; Perfect. The first line of Don Quixote: &quot;In a place of the Channel, whose name do not want to remember, has not much Time living a Hidalgo the spearheaded in shipyard, adarga Antigua, Roc&iacute;n weak and galgo corridor.&quot; Clearly, in the world of machine translation, everything has its limits.</p>
<p>The problem with translation software is context. When you hear or read a sentence, your brain refers not only to the spoken words but also to its accumulated experience. The words &quot;con&quot; and &quot;pen,&quot; for example, have various meanings and can represent different parts of speech. But when you read &quot;the con is in the pen,&quot; you know instantly that you are dealing with an incarcerated criminal—your life experience allows each word to contextualize the other. A computer can't do that because it has no frame of reference to help it match the contingent sense of &quot;con&quot; as criminal to the contingent sense of &quot;pen&quot; as jail. Short of being endowed with a knowledge base as vast as the human mind's, a computer simply cannot read context.</p>
<p>There are three fundamental types of machine translation in use today. Basic machine translation breaks each sentence down into component words, which are further analyzed for their base forms and grammatical and functional structures. The sentences are then transferred into the target language, sometimes using an &quot;interlingua,&quot; an artificial language or universal interface such as Esperanto that is applicable, in theory, to all languages. The interlingua idea has been around for a long time, but a truly viable one has yet to be written.</p>
<p>Memory-based systems do not actually translate, but draw on a broad database of exact or similar matches from sentences or phrases that are already known. They can be useful in areas with a lot of standard phrasing, such as business letters, boilerplate contracts, and medical diagnostics.</p>
<p>Statistical/cryptographic systems, such as Language Weaver, calculate the probabilities of correspondence by examining parallel texts. They then &quot;learn&quot; these translation patterns and use them to translate similar constructs. But claims of extraordinary accuracy are generally not borne out in tests by professional, human translators. </p>
<p>The holy grail of MT is FAHQT: Fully Automatic, High-Quality Translation. For now, professional and amateur users content themselves with &quot;gisting&quot;—the practice of accepting 80 percent accuracy so as to get a general sense of a text's meaning. (Ninety percent accuracy leaves one error on every line.) Professionals who work with MT always do so in conjunction with human judgment, either by &quot;pre-editing&quot; to limit vocabulary or by &quot;post-editing&quot; to correct errors. In my job, where political sensitivity and nuance are everything, &quot;gisting&quot; would be worse than useless. On the other hand, I often use a dedicated memory-based system to translate treaty names, provisions of international law, and the like because they are directly correspondent and there's no risk of error.</p>
<p>There are plenty of computer scientists who think we don't need to settle for Not Really Automatic, Pretty-Mediocre Translation. Mike Collins of MIT, for one, has high hopes for &quot;machine learning,&quot; which bypasses the need to hand-encode software by comparing broad databases of text previously translated by humans. In theory, this will allow the machine translator to learn grammatical rules. With vast oceans of multilingual text now available digitally—Collins cites documents created by the European Parliament—this may indeed be the best hope for MT, though it is probably still a long way from affordable commercial application.</p>
<p>Language Weaver CEO Bryce Benjamin acknowledges that even the best translation software cannot hope to replace human translators; it is simply one tool &quot;to help them to increase productivity and value.&quot; That was all I needed to know. The war on terrorism notwithstanding, my job and those of thousands of professional translators in the arts, sciences, and industry seem relatively safe for now. But then again, horses were pretty damn sure of themselves 100 years ago, and look what happened to them.</p>Mon, 09 Jan 2006 11:16:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2006/01/the_translators_blues.htmlJesse Browner2006-01-09T11:16:00ZWill I get replaced by a computer program?TechnologyWill translators get replaced by computers?2133922Jesse BrownerWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2133922falsefalsefalseWill translators get replaced by computers?Will translators get replaced by computers?TV You'll Want To Pay Forhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/11/tv_youll_want_to_pay_for.html
<p> It has now been 20 days since Apple announced it would <a href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/videos/">sell selected ABC-Disney television programs</a> via iTunes. As of Monday, iTunes customers had bought more than than <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7BCD390134-550F-4068-A92A-D8E927DC623B%7D&amp;siteid=google">1 million videos</a>. At first glance, these sales figures seem like another nail in the coffin of broadcast television. If we can get television content online, on demand, whenever we want it, how will networks convince us to tune in on their schedules? For that matter, how can they be certain we'll tune in at all?</p>
<p>The iTunes distribution model does give the networks a huge opportunity to reinvent themselves, though. By allowing viewers to purchase individual episodes, broadcast-television executives could free themselves from the yoke of advertising revenue. That could potentially usher in a new age of television, one where fans have the power to keep their favorite series in production and producers have the opportunity to create more elaborate, controversial, and innovative programs.</p>
<p>Until now, broadcast television has followed a predictable pattern. If a show does not attract enough viewers, it goes off the air. Sometimes this system functions perfectly (e.g., <em>Who Wants To Marry My Dad?</em>), but it often fails in spectacular fashion. Many of the most innovative shows of the last two decades—shows that generated critical acclaim and cult followings—have been early casualties of the ratings wars.</p>
<p>When such shows get canceled, there are generally two explanations: Either the network didn't know how to market or schedule the show, or the series grew too complex and unwelcoming for casual viewers and latecomers. (Joss Whedon's <em>Firefly</em> is an example of <a href="http://www.storypundit.com/archives/000794.html">the former</a>, while David Lynch's <em>Twin Peaks</em> exemplifies the latter.) Both scenarios are symptoms of the same problem. There's still an assumption that if a show is good enough, a sizable audience will be sitting in front of the television when it airs. In an age of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/fashion/thursdaystyles/27dvd.html">DVD boxed sets</a> and TiVo, such a belief is fatally flawed.</p>
<p>As iTunes and its inevitable competitors offer more broadcast-television content, producers won't have to depend on couch potatoes as their only audience. They also won't have to compromise their programs to meet broadcast requirements. Episode lengths can vary as needed, content can be darker, more topical, and more explicit. If the networks are clever, these changes can supplement broadcast programming rather than replace it. Audiences already expect director's cuts and deleted scenes on DVDs. It's not hard to imagine that the networks might one day air a &quot;broadcast cut&quot; of an episode, then encourage viewers to download the longer, racier director's cut the next afternoon.</p>
<p>Nor will episodic programs have to be self-contained to remain accessible to new viewers. While DVDs now give viewers the chance to catch up between seasons, on-demand television will allow anyone to catch up at any time, quickly and legally. Producers will no longer have to choose between alienating new viewers with a complex storyline or alienating the established audience by rehashing details from previous episodes. (This would be especially critical for plot-intensive shows like <em>Alias</em>, which has been forced to &quot;reboot&quot; its plot several times to make it accessible to new viewers.) If they're smart, the networks will realize this is not only feasible but extremely profitable. Rather than recapping relevant details from previous episodes (&quot;Previously on <em>Alias ...</em>&quot;), we may soon be encouraged to buy our way up to speed (&quot;Before watching tonight's<em> Alias,</em> download Episodes 4, 5, and 6.&quot;) </p>
<p>The most enticing possibility, though, is that on-demand television will allow audiences to take an active role in programming the networks. We've seen several examples of fans banding together to save their favorite programs in the past few years. Fox put<em> Family Guy</em> back into production on the strength of high DVD sales, NBC released <em>Freaks and Geeks </em>on DVD after getting bombarded with petitions, and a fan-organized campaign to resurrect <em>Firefly</em> resulted in last month's big-screen release of <em> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2127100/">Serenity</a></em>. </p>
<p>Direct downloads will give fans of endangered shows the chance to vote with their wallets while a show is still on the air. And when a program <em>does</em> go off the air, direct payments from fans might provide enough revenue to keep it in production as an online-only venture. If we assume that the average hour-long drama costs $1.5 million per episode and downloads will cost around $2 per viewer, shows would only need a few million viewers to turn a small profit. Would a few million viewers pay $2 a week to download an hour of television? It's certainly not impossible. In the past month, viewers have shelled out <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=serenity.htm">more than $30 million</a> for two hours of <em>Serenity</em>. And even if viewers aren't prepared to pay $2 per show, there's nothing to stop the networks from offering free downloads with embedded advertising (which could be far better targeted than the ads networks currently show).</p>
<p>MIT's Henry Jenkins, for one, has already written extensively on potential business models for online, on-demand television. Jenkins <a href="http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&amp;id=936">outlines a subscription model</a> where viewers pay in advance for an entire season of downloadable episodes, providing the startup capital needed to fund production. Episodes would also be available at a higher cost on a per-episode basis, providing a steady stream of additional funds. Downloadable television also would provide access to a global audience, which would presumably include many viewers who would be thrilled to buy episodes rather than wait for shows to arrive in their country. (The BBC is <a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/stories/ashleyrts.shtml">already well ahead of us</a> on this.)</p>
<p>If iTunes shows us anything, it's that audiences are willing to purchase their media when it is simple, affordable, and convenient. With <a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050927-5357.html">Google</a>, <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/yahoo.html?tw=wn_tophead_3">Yahoo!</a>, and <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_06/b3919124_mz063.htm">Microsoft</a> set to join Apple in the television wars, it's a safe bet that we'll see more major-network content for sale in the near future. For those of us who use peer-to-peer software like <a href="http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&amp;id=1133">BitTorrent</a> to download the shows we miss, there's no rush. For everyone else, I just hope <em>Veronica Mars</em> and <em>Arrested Development</em> will be available for download before the networks give up on them. </p>Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:02:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/11/tv_youll_want_to_pay_for.htmlIvan Askwith2005-11-01T22:02:00ZHow $2 downloads can revive network television.TechnologyHow $2 downloads can revive network television.2129003Ivan AskwithWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2129003falsefalsefalseHow $2 downloads can revive network television.How $2 downloads can revive network television.Firefly: Could it have been saved by on-demand TV?How To Monkey With the Webhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/09/how_to_monkey_with_the_web.html
<p> I can't go a day without checking Boing Boing, the quirky blog that throws vintage art, live posts from hurricane zones, and Japanese robots onto the same page. The problem is that I work in an open office where everyone can see my screen, and <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/">Boing Boing's home page</a> is festooned with scantily clad T-shirt models and ads for soft-core porn sites. Wouldn't it be great if I could turn those ads off at the office?</p>
<p>Thanks to a piece of software called Greasemonkey, I can do that and lots more. Greasemonkey, a plug-in for the Firefox browser, allows you to run &quot;user scripts&quot;—Javascript programs that tweak other people's Web pages after you've loaded them. (In theory you could pull this same stunt with Internet Explorer, but no one's offered the software yet.) Most commercial sites already have Javascript programs nested inside that turn menus on and off or respond when you press a button. <a href="http://maps.google.com/">Google Maps</a> is a great example—it's more program than page. </p>
<p>Greasemonkey lets you play Web designer. Instead of settling for a site's out-of-the-box appearance and functionality, you can stuff in your own Javascript apps. User scripts can rearrange or remove images, add links and buttons, even mix content from multiple Web sites onto the same page. Greasemonkey doesn't mess with the entire Internet. The software waits until a page is downloaded to your local machine, then modifies it on your screen only—when I hide Boing Boing's cheesecake, the girlie pics are still there for every other Web surfer.</p>
<p>Don't worry, you don't have to write the scripts yourself. Gung-ho Greasemonkey acolytes have already written a few thousand mini-applications that, for example, add competitors' prices to Amazon's book pages, install extra buttons on Google, and increase the security of Yahoo! Mail sessions. All of this is a shocking reminder that Web pages aren't static. Talk of the spread of &quot;remix culture&quot; has become standard fare—we TiVo past commercials, burn mix CDs, and <a href="http://www.snapsandbytes.co.uk/video38.html">make Bush and Blair lip-sync</a> to &quot;Endless Love.&quot; But site designers have somehow convinced us that their pages are as immutable as a glossy brochure. Greasemonkey resurrects the Web's original spec: Page layouts are just suggestions, people. Everything is remixable.</p>
<p>When <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/start.html?pg=7">I wrote about Greasemonkey</a> for <em>Wired</em> recently, I argued that this simple program had the potential to mess with the business models of e-commerce sites. Many user scripts undo copyright protection, remove ads and sponsored links, or end-run registration pages. The experts I interviewed predicted a cops-and-robbers battle between site owners and script hackers. Greasemonkey might make the Net a better-designed place; it might just rob online vendors of their revenue.</p>
<p>(You might've heard that Greasemonkey will also make the net a less secure place. Reports that the software has a massive security hole are out of date, though. That bug, which was never exploited, got <a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1842319,00.asp">patched</a> within days back in July. That's not a 100-percent security guarantee, but be aware that Firefox has yet to see the kind of real attacks that <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2103152/">barraged</a> Internet Explorer last year.)</p>
<p>Readers e-mailed to say all of this would be really interesting—if only they could get the damn thing to work on their computer. Indeed, Greasemonkey's makers stunted its superpowers with a standard geek blunder: There aren't any installation instructions. </p>
<p> That's easy to fix. It takes five minutes to get Greasemonkey up and running, and you won't have to close this page to do it. To see my step-by-step instructions, click <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2126909">here</a>.</p>
<p>Once you have Greasemonkey installed, you're ready to take a tour of the Web as customized by its users. The best place to start is <a href="http://www.userscripts.org/">Userscripts.org</a>, a repository of 1,800 mini-applications that address a laundry list of gripes. Install the <a href="http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/590">BoingBoing Butler</a>, and—<em>voil&agrave;</em>!—Boing Boing's ad-laden sidebars appear briefly, then wink out of existence. The middle strip of stories widens to fill the empty space.</p>
<p>Userscripts.org also includes applications that let you fix CNN's buggy video links and eBay's feedback pages, which (until now) didn't let you hide all the positive posts and show just the complaints. You can add Internet Movie Database ratings to Netflix movie pages, or Blockbuster links to IMDb. Ad-remover scripts are popular, but the cooler ones clean up awkward sites or add obvious features that the designer left out. There are dozens of scripts just for Google. One Gmail widget puts a Delete button right where Sergey and Larry left it out. Another adds a history of your recent searches whenever you revisit the site. </p>
<p>After spending a weekend looking for the most striking example of Greasemonkey's power, I gave top honors to two scripts. (And an honorable mention to this goofy but eye-opening <a href="http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?p=128">script</a> that turns Boing Boing into an interactive quiz by replacing the author bylines with multiple-choice popup menus.) </p>
<p> <a href="http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/magicline.user.js">Magic Line</a> crawls every page you visit and creates a searchable history of links and RSS feeds you might have missed. Hold down Ctrl-Shift-L and a semitransparent search pane appears atop your browser window. I typed &quot;New Orleans&quot; and found a blog entry from the storm zone that I'd overlooked while speed-surfing.</p>
<p> The other winning script overhauls the Library of Congress'<a href="http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsachtml/fsacsubjindex1.html">American Memory</a> photo collection, a valuable archive hobbled by HTML pages straight out of 1995. Install the <a href="http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2005/09/17/monkeyfun">American Memory Fixer</a> and the exhibit gets a makeover: tidy white pages with new fonts, a smarter layout, and large photos rather than thumbnails. It's more than a modification—it's a renovation.</p>
<p>These demos inspired me to write my own user script to streamline the <a href="http://www.splunk.com/?ac=p">site I've been working for</a> into a lightweight search page. After an hour of fruitless keyboard-pounding, I realized the guys who wrote Magic Line and American Memory Fixer spend a lot more time on this than I do.</p>
<p>That's the limitation that threatens Greasemonkey's potential: Unless you're a natural programmer, you'll just have to hope some hacker shares your annoyance with, say, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s front page. So far the distribution of scripts is twofold—they're either for superpopular sites like CNN or programmer's hangouts like Slashdot, with a few niche favorites thrown in. (I haven't found a single script for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> yet.) You also better hope the guy who programmed your script knows what he's doing. Buyer beware, because not all Greasemonkey scripts work flawlessly: My editor installed one that promised to trim the ads on IMDb, but it erased his whole page instead. (A script that doesn't work as advertised is annoying but won't cause any permanent damage—it's easy enough just to turn it off). </p>
<p>Greasemonkey recalls the giddy fun of when browsers first came out a dozen years ago. It also suffers from the same problem that hamstrung the Web before the arrival of easy-to-use site-building tools. Only a tech-savvy elite knows enough to play with it. The rest of us are still consumers. What we need is a Greasemonkey Remix Tool, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor that lets us redesign other people's Web pages on-screen, then spits out a script to make it happen. Something this powerful is too good to let the hackers have all to themselves. </p>Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:05:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/09/how_to_monkey_with_the_web.htmlPaul Boutin2005-09-26T17:05:00ZThe software that lets you rewrite your favorite sites.TechnologyHow to rewrite your favorite Web sites.2126908Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2126908falsefalsefalseHow to rewrite your favorite Web sites.How to rewrite your favorite Web sites.Green-Collar Crimehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/08/greencollar_crime.html
<p> A tip for all of you aspiring investigative reporters: When you expose an Internet sex hoax, there are going to be consequences. Take it from me. My sleuthing got me an unplanned role in a piece of erotic fiction that starred Chewbacca as a Wookiee Casanova.</p>
<p>It all started on the weekend of July 4, when I spotted a discussion on the Web site <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/43232">Metafilter</a> about a new fad called &quot;greenlighting.&quot; The dubious claim was that an &quot;emerging underground [group] of sexually promiscuous teenagers&quot; had started wearing green shirts with the collar popped up. When a greenlighter spotted a fellow traveler, he yanked his or her collar down, triggering anonymous sexual escapades. (What's it called when you wave off a green-shirted lothario? Redlighting, of course.)</p>
<p>Along with several other bloggers, I immediately <a href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~cfarivar/blog/archives/000631.html">posted my doubts</a> that these jolly green hornballs existed. Later that day, I checked my blog's traffic reports and found that a number of visitors were coming from <a href="http://www.wookiefetish.com/">WookieFetish</a>, a site that, true to its name, sports a photo of Han Solo's big hairy sidekick, Chewbacca. The page that linked to my site was locked up in WookieFetish's members-only discussion boards. I signed up for an account using my real name and the handle &quot;cfarivar.&quot; </p>
<p>I discovered that WookieFetish was <a href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~cfarivar/blog/archives/000648.html">the planning ground</a> for a massive hoax. It seemed like the ringleaders, who went by MadChad41 and Halcyon, were trying to match the success of 2004's &quot;toothing&quot; scam. A guy named &quot;Toothy Toothing&quot; (later revealed to be a <a href="http://www.edge-online.co.uk/">British magazine</a> editor) sold <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62687,00.html">gullible</a> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3673093.stm">journalists</a> on the idea that British teens were initiating anonymous sex acts by typing &quot;toothing?&quot; into their Bluetooth-enabled cell phones. The WookieFetish schemers kick-started their prank using the same methods as the toothers: a <a href="http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:xyuOPGEEN9kJ:www.greenlighter.org/viewtopic.php%3Ft%3D94+greenlighter&amp;hl=en">phony forum</a> laying out greenlighting etiquette (&quot;What do I do after I get collared? Simply go into a secluded place and begin the act you wish to engage in&quot;), backdated blog entries, and hot tales of green-shirt sex told to gullible reporters (&quot;A well known soap star was seen greenlighting for ladies after live8&quot;). </p>
<p>Later, I found out via Wikipedia that greenlighting began its short life on <a href="http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:H_420gv4J_wJ:forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php%3Fpostid%3D300756553+site:http://forums.somethingawful.com+hoax&amp;hl=en">a message board</a> at the site Something Awful. The plan was to create a video compilation of green-shirt-wearing pickup artists and distribute it to blogs and peer-to-peer networks. The ultimate goal: &quot;to spread the rumor until it reaches some national attention&nbsp;... the Oprah show, <em>Good Morning America</em>, or some crappy national news channel.&quot;</p>
<p>Before any video started making the rounds, I <a href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~cfarivar/blog/archives/000648.html">outed the greenlighters</a> with a few choice quotes from WookieFetish. I also logged into Wikipedia and updated the entry on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenlighting">greenlighting</a> (which has since been deleted) with a terse, &quot;This is a hoax.&quot; When some additional skeptics posted screen shots from the Something Awful forum, the jig was up. The WookieFetishists closed down their message board that night. I thought it was all over. </p>
<p>Then the <a href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~cfarivar/blog/archives/000649.html">first e-mail</a> came in. &quot;You seem like the kind of person that would go to a child's birthday party uninvited, and then proceed to explain loudly how the magician does all his tricks.&quot; That was soon followed by comments on my blog. &quot;If this hoax had gotten big and you were the one to bust it, then maybe you could've found an e-girlfriend,&quot; one said. &quot;Poorly played, cfarivar, poorly played.&quot; By midafternoon, my cell phone had a voice mail when I hadn't heard it ring. &quot;This is the nicest phone call you're going to get,&quot; intoned a measured, even voice that Anthony Hopkins would envy, &quot;asking you to <em>remove your blog from the Internet.</em>&quot;</p>
<p>Checking my site's traffic numbers again, I saw a surge since the night before. A lot of it originated from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Farivar">my own Wikipedia entry</a>. (Yes, I added an entry on myself to Wikipedia. Why haven't you?) Clicking through, I saw that the greenlighters had replaced my boring &quot;technology journalist living in Oakland&quot; entry with a detailed sexual fantasy involving&nbsp;... a Wookiee. I read as far as &quot;Chewie reached down with his jaw and grasped the jeans and knickers, tugging them down savagely&quot; before taking the story down. They responded by adding a clumsy <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/91/Pulitzer20061ta.jpg/300px-Pulitzer20061ta.jpg">Photoshop job</a> of me accepting a Pulitzer Prize from a Wookiee. I tried to undo it. Someone else added a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Madbomber0ix.gif">British tabloid</a> page marked up to depict me as a terrorist. </p>
<p>That night, my cell phone rang again. &quot;Hey,&quot; said the voice—a familiar, calm male voice. &quot;Come back to the boards.&quot; The greenlighters wanted to be friends! As he went on about how cool it would be if I posted to their site, I realized that a) this was almost certainly the guy who threatened me earlier, and b) I was staring at his caller ID. Still, I decided not to do anything. My mysterious caller hadn't gotten the memo—greenlighting was so over. </p>
<p>A failed hoax doesn't leave many traces. All that's left are cached versions of the greenlighter forum, a cached version of the <a href="http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:mU7szgL9DrQJ:www.hyalineskies.com/greenlight/wiki_archives/Greenlighting.html+hyalineskies+greenlighting&amp;hl=en&amp;client=firefox-a">Wikipedia entry</a>, and a <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3d/Green1.gif">Something Awful screenshot</a>. And what became of WookieFetish? All of the message board's greenlighting plans have now been replaced with&nbsp;... discussions of Wookiees.</p>Mon, 01 Aug 2005 16:31:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/08/greencollar_crime.htmlCyrus Farivar2005-08-01T16:31:00ZHow I stopped an Internet sex hoax.TechnologyHow I stopped an Internet sex hoax.2123673Cyrus FarivarWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2123673falsefalsefalseHow I stopped an Internet sex hoax.How I stopped an Internet sex hoax.Smooth Operatorshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/06/smooth_operators.html
<p> I'm sitting in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. I just spoke with my girlfriend in New York for an hour. Per-minute cost: $0. That's because my trusty Internet phone came along with me. <p>An Internet phone is nothing more than an inconsequential-looking electronic adapter with blinking lights on the front and a few jacks in the back. Plug a normal telephone into its phone jack, then plug the adapter directly into your router, which is hooked up to a broadband Internet connection. Some Internet phone carriers also let you make calls through your computer; others, like Skype, require it. But the genius of most Internet phones is that your computer isn't involved at all.</p><p>Increasing competition from tech upstarts like Vonage and anxious traditionalists like Verizon has led to insanely low prices for VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) service. For flat rates as low as $20 per month, you can get a U.S. phone number with unlimited domestic calling—and several services also throw in Canada and parts of Latin America, Asia, and Europe, too. Moreover, because the little Internet phone adapters plug into any broadband Internet connection, your beloved 212 number will follow you to Abu Dhabi.</p></p>
<p>Competition has also led to a proliferation of newfangled Web features, many of which have spread to most carriers. You can have your voice mails e-mailed to you or check them online. You can forward your calls to several numbers—like your work or cell—simultaneously. And many have some kind of online address book that can enable call blocking and call filtering, too.</p>
<p>The downside of VoIP is that it's not real phone service. You may pay fewer taxes, but you don't automatically get, say, <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2106424/">911 service</a>, and the thing won't work in a blackout. Reliability also is not always up to land-line snuff. Sometimes there's no dial tone, your outgoing calls don't go through, or the other party can't hear you. I also have a nagging suspicion that I am missing important calls, a fear stoked by scattered complaints like, &quot;Your Internet phone sucks&quot; and, &quot;Why does your damned phone never pick up?&quot;</p>
<p>Still, VoIP marketing has become so ubiquitous that even my dad wants in. To find out if VoIP is really mature enough to replace your land line, I performed a series tests on seven services. Keep in mind that these results are hardly scientific: The quality and reliability of these phones depends in great measure on the quality and reliability of your Internet connection. While my setup—a cable modem—is very common, it does not mean my experience was typical.</p>
<p><strong></strong></p>
<p>Methodology</p>
<p><strong>Sound quality</strong> (15 points): Does it sound as good as a land line? I called a tester with no Internet phone experience (my dad) and asked him to blindly judge each phone. To hear how each system performed with limited bandwidth, we had conversations while I uploaded and downloaded enormous files on BitTorrent and played Xbox online. To find out how well each phone distinguished my voice from background noise, we spoke while I blasted OMD's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000000W6N/qid=1119627696/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/102-1399019-0789718?v=glance&amp;s=music&amp;n=507846"><em>Architecture &amp; Morality</em></a>. </p>
<p><strong>Reliability</strong><strong></strong>(15 points): Do outgoing calls always go through? Does each incoming call actually ring? I set up a computer to make and receive one call every 10 minutes for a little more than nine hours straight. The idea was to see how many of the almost 60 calls were actually placed or received. Each missed call led to a one-point deduction from the maximum score of 15. </p>
<p><strong>International</strong> (5 points): Some newer phone services include unlimited calling to certain countries. Many others charge very low per-minute rates. I averaged the per-minute rates from the United States to London, Paris, Shanghai, and Tokyo, then plotted the costs on a five-point scale. The most expensive service got 1 point, the cheapest 5 points. (To be fair, the highest average—AT&amp;T's 6 cents per minute—wasn't terribly high.)</p>
<p><strong>Portability</strong> (5 points): I lugged every one of these devices on a plane to Los Angeles, and none of them set off any red flags with baggage screeners. Two of them went with me to Abu Dhabi, where they passed through customs without a problem. The score, then, is based solely on size and weight. They vary from the size of a deck of cards (GalaxyVoice) to that of a George Foreman grill (AT&amp;T).</p>
<p><strong>Bells and whistles</strong>(5 points): These days most VoIP providers have the same suite of features, but some are missing big ones (online voice mail), and others stand out with intuitive Web interfaces that allow you to make call-forwarding schedules or even program music to play while your friends are on hold.</p>
<p><strong>Number</strong><strong> selection</strong> (5 points): With local number portability, you can bring your own number to your Internet phone. But half the fun is choosing your own area code, and sometimes your whole phone number. Points were awarded for ease of selection and availability of the coveted 212.</p>
<p>Results (from worst to first):</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.broadvoice.com/"><strong>BroadVoice</strong></a><em><br />$39.95 activation fee and $24.95 per month for unlimited calling in the U.S. and 34 countries.</em></p>
<p>I tested BroadVoice as the geek option. It advertises the ability to BYOD (i.e., &quot;bring your own device&quot;), meaning you're in luck if you're one of the few who has something like the <a href="http://us.zyxel.com/products/model.php?indexcate=1109113163&amp;indexcate1=&amp;indexFlagvalue=1079378556">ZyXEL P-2000W v.2</a> Wi-Fi phone. For the rest of us, the most appealing thing about BroadVoice is the promise of unlimited calling to 35 countries. If only it worked consistently. During the reliability test, the phone got stuck on a fast busy signal for more than two hours when making outgoing calls. It didn't fare so well in voice quality, either. When I uploaded a few big files to test the response to limited bandwidth, my dad grew frustrated with the garbled sound. &quot;This one is the pits,&quot; he said. </p>
<p><strong>Sound quality:</strong> 9.5<br /><strong>Reliability:</strong> -2<br /><strong>International:</strong> 5<br /><strong>Portability:</strong> 4<br /><strong>Bells and whistles:</strong> 4 (sleek Web interface, but awesome-sounding new features like e-mail notifications for calls from specific phone numbers have been listed as &quot;coming soon&quot; for months) <br /><strong>Number selection:</strong> 2 (no 212; international numbers are available)<br /><strong>Total:</strong> 22.5</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.skype.com/"><strong>Skype</strong></a><em><br />0.017 euros per minute (approximately 2 cents per minute) to the U.S. and many countries (10 euro minimum purchase, plus 30 euros for 12 months of incoming calls and voice mail).</em></p>
<p>The free computer-to-computer phone service has recently made a play to be your everyday phone. Skype now offers the bare minimum that you need to replace a land line: outgoing and incoming calls to and from<strong></strong>regular telephones, plus voice mail service. You'll have fun choosing your phone number through a snazzy interface that searches for specific sequences of digits or letters, but the selection isn't very big. (Also, for some reason your number shows up on other peoples' caller ID as a weirdo foreign number.) In the automated test, all but one incoming call came through. But several times when I called on my own, calls wouldn't connect and I'd have to try again. The hollow voice quality wasn't nearly up to land-line snuff on my older PC laptop, either. </p>
<p><strong>Sound quality:</strong> 6<br /><strong>Reliability:</strong> 14*<br /><strong>International:</strong> 3<br /><strong>Portability:</strong> 5 (no adapter required)<br /><strong>Bells and whistles:</strong> 1<br /><strong>Number selection:</strong> 2 (no 212; international numbers are available)<br /><strong>Total:</strong> 31</p>
<p><em></em></p>
<p>*Only tested incoming, as I couldn't figure out how to automate a batch of outgoing Skype calls.</p>
<p> <a href="https://www22.verizon.com/ForYourHome/VOIP/VOIPHome.aspx"><strong>Verizon VoiceWing</strong></a><em><br />Free activation and $34.95 per month for unlimited calling in the U.S.</em></p>
<p>Verizon's &quot;VoiceWing&quot; service raises a key question: Why dilute a recognizable brand by inventing a stupid name for your VoIP service? (Also see: AT&amp;T CallVantage.) In any case, VoiceWing's top-notch Web site features integration with its online yellow pages and lets you coordinate simultaneous ringing of your VoIP line, cell phone, and work number. But even in the normal conversation test, my dad thought VoiceWing sounded a little too tinny. When I made business calls, one source told me I sounded &quot;fuzzy&quot; and told me to call back. Can you hear me now? Not so well. </p>
<p><strong>Sound quality:</strong> 8<br /><strong>Reliability:</strong> 10<br /><strong>International:</strong> 1 (even Canada isn't free)<br /><strong>Portability:</strong> 4<br /><strong>Bells and whistles:</strong> 5<br /><strong>Number selection:</strong> 4 (no 212; nice selection otherwise)<br /><strong>Total:</strong> 32</p>
<p> <a href="https://www.packet8.net/"><strong>Packet8</strong></a><em><br />$29.95 activation fee and $19.95 per month for unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada.</em></p>
<p>I've been a Packet8 customer for more than a year now. Packet8 once lapped the field by offering a flat, $20-per-month rate for unlimited long distance when everyone else charged around $35. But in the last several months, everyone's lowered their prices while continuing to offer features that Packet8 doesn't have—like online voice-mail retrieval, which I desperately covet. Instead, Packet8 has invested its time making an optional $250 videophone that at least works pretty well (even between Abu Dhabi and New York). The good news: The voice quality was perfect when I wasn't uploading anything, and not so bad otherwise. &quot;It's better than a regular phone,&quot; says dad.</p>
<p><strong>Sound quality:</strong> 11<br /><strong>Reliability: </strong>13<br /><strong>International: </strong>3<br /><strong>Portability: </strong>3<br /><strong>Bells and whistles: </strong>1<br /><strong>Number selection: </strong>2 (no 212)<br /><strong>Total: </strong>33</p>
<p><p> <a href="http://www.usa.att.com/callvantage/index.jsp?"><strong>Vonage</strong></a><br />$29.99 activation fee plus $24.95 per month for unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada.</p><p>The most prominent VoIP provider did fine: good reliability and pretty good voice quality. It has the de rigeur online voice-mail retrieval and multiple-phone-ringing ability—what it calls &quot;SimulRing.&quot; But Vonage doesn't quite rise to land-line replacement level—it doesn't sound as good as Packet8.</p><p><strong>Sound quality:</strong> 9<br /><strong>Reliability:</strong> 14<br /><strong>International:</strong> 1<br /><strong>Portability:</strong> 4<br /><strong>Bells and whistles:</strong> 5<br /><strong>Number selection:</strong> 3 (no 212)<br /><strong>Total:</strong> 36</p><p><strong> <a href="http://www.galaxyvoice.com/"><strong>GalaxyVoice</strong><em><br /></em></a></strong><em>$24.95 activation fee and $19.95 per month for unlimited calling in the U.S. and to 20 other countries.</em></p></p>
<p>The cheapest option turns out to be a very good value if you're willing to sacrifice some voice quality. GalaxyVoice offers 212 numbers, the smallest adapter I tested, and a perfect score in the reliability test. But the real claim to fame here is the &quot;free&quot; plan: Pay $60 for an adapter and activation fee and you get 60 minutes of outgoing calls and unlimited incoming calls for free, so long as you accept a Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or New York area code—including 212! The catch: Even under optimal conditions, the quality wasn't so great, and it was completely impossible to have a conversation during the BitTorrent/Xbox test.</p>
<p><strong>Sound quality:</strong> 8<br /><strong>Reliability:</strong> 15<br /><strong>International: </strong>5<br /><strong>Portability:</strong> 5<br /><strong>Bells and whistles:</strong> 3<br /><strong>Number selection:</strong> 4 (has 212!)<br /><strong>Total:</strong> 40</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.usa.att.com/callvantage/index.jsp?"><strong>AT&amp;T CallVantage</strong></a><em><br />$29.99 activation fee and $29.99 per month for unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada (first month free, through Dec. 31, 2005).</em></p>
<p>Along with GalaxyVoice, CallVantage is the only service that didn't miss a single incoming or outgoing call.&nbsp;Most important, this was the only provider to sound as good as or better than a land line during both normal and Xbox/BitTorrent conversations. The reason, an AT&amp;T flack tells me, is that their adapter replaces your router and throttles back bandwidth-hogging devices (like your computer or Xbox) while you're on a call. Unfortunately, that means it's bigger than any other adapter—about the size of a small George Foreman grill. And it also needs to be wired between your cable or DSL modem and anything else that's connected to the Internet, making it more cumbersome to unplug and take with you. Not that my dad cares. &quot;This is the one I want,&quot; he says.</p>
<p><p><strong>Sound quality:</strong> 14<br /><strong>Reliability:</strong> 15<br /><strong>International:</strong> 1<br /><strong>Portability:</strong> 1<br /><strong>Bells and whistles:</strong> 5<br /><strong>Number selection:</strong> 5 (has 212!)<br /><strong>Total:</strong> 41</p></p>Wed, 29 Jun 2005 22:10:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/06/smooth_operators.htmlSam Schechner2005-06-29T22:10:00ZWhich Internet phone service is best?TechnologyWhich Internet phone service is best?2121742Sam SchechnerWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2121742falsefalsefalseWhich Internet phone service is best?Which Internet phone service is best?Crying, While Eatinghttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/06/crying_while_eating.html
<p> I found a <a href="http://blog.livedoor.jp/parumo_zaeega/archives/22668805.html#comments">picture</a> of my girlfriend on a Japanese fetish site the other day. Yes, that was definitely her, cramming a piece of sausage into her mouth as tears streamed down her face. What's that right below her? A breast pump? This was all my fault. I'm the one who put that video online. They never told me that Internet celebrity would be like this.</p>
<p>A month before, I had signed up for a &quot;contagious media&quot; contest. The rules: Make a (nonpornographic) Web site. Promote it any way you want, short of paid advertisements. The page with the most visitors after three weeks wins. </p>
<p>The contest's host was Jonah Peretti, the creator of the much-forwarded <a href="http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com/">Black People Love Us</a>. Peretti now runs a research group at New York's <a href="http://www.eyebeam.org/">Eyebeam</a> art and technology center that studies how sites get passed around the Internet. According to Eyebeam's experts, Web pages spread via the &quot;Bored at Work Network&quot;—the millions of shiftless desk jockeys whose fingers are glued to the forward button on their e-mail. <a href="http://www.thedogisland.com/">Hoax product sites</a> and pages that <a href="http://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/savetoby.asp">elicit a nervous laugh</a><strong></strong>get passed around a lot, as do funny animal videos and movies of people dancing. But the most successful contagions are the oddballs, earnest amateurs like the <a href="http://www.pixyland.org/peterpan/"><em>Peter Pan </em>guy</a> and the <a href="http://www.ebaumsworld.com/starwarskidv.html"><em>Star Wars </em>kid</a> who had never tried to tap in to the Bored at Work Network. How could I compete with them?</p>
<p>As contestants, we had at least one advantage over the <em>Peter Pan </em>guy: a workshop that allowed us to kick around ideas with certified <a href="http://www.zefrank.com/">contagious-media</a> <a href="http://www.cpbgroup.com/">professionals</a>. Very few of us actually did. One guy announced his plan to create an animated dog that vomited things. After an awkward silence, the expert on hand suggested that he might want to think of a new idea. I was confused. Was a barfing dog any worse than the contagious <a href="http://www.platinumgrit.com/pokethebunny.htm">Poke the Bunny</a> site we'd learned about an hour before? </p>
<p> <a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/media/2005/06/79_christy_110k.asf"><strong>Christy</strong><em>What she's eating:</em> Sausage with mushrooms and cheese; a vanilla shake. <em>What she's crying about:</em> Good at lots of things, but not great at anything.</a> Forget the dogs and bunnies. I wanted my site to be about people, or food, or people and food. My friend and collaborator Casimir Nozkowski remembered a game he used to play at camp: Stuff some food in your mouth, and cry. We had our idea—Crying, While Eating.</p>
<p>On a rainy night, we drove around New York with a video camera, some sausage, a box of fried chicken, and an apple. I watched my friend Rob fast-forward through <em>Babe</em> until he got to the part<strong></strong>where the sheepdog puppies are given away. Casimir zoomed in as Rob sobbed good, long sobs into the fried chicken. We took off a few minutes later with the sausage and the apple.</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.cryingwhileeating.com/">Crying, While Eating</a> launched on a Thursday night with 12 videos. Christy, who was drinking a vanilla shake, cried because she was &quot;good at lots of things, but not great at anything.&quot; Tashi lamented the fact that &quot;sex will never be that good again&quot; while munching on Milano cookies. I ate buckwheat noodles with rooster sauce and blubbered about having &quot;ruined Passover.&quot; </p>
<p>We waited until the next morning to send a batch of self-promotional e-mails. By the time we got out of bed, the blog Waxy had spotted our page on the <a href="http://showdown.contagiousmedia.org/">contest Web site</a>. From there, we got picked up by <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/20/videos_of_people_eat.html">BoingBoing</a> and <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/42139">Metafilter</a>. I e-mailed the URL to a former co-worker in San Francisco that afternoon. He said he'd already gotten it from another friend in California, who had gotten the link from a guy in Austin, Texas. When I checked the stats that night, we had almost 50,000 visitors.</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/media/2005/06/12_daniel_110k.asf"><strong>Daniel</strong><em>What he's eating</em>: Buckwheat noodles and rooster sauce. <em>What he's crying about</em>: He ruined Passover.</a> On Saturday morning, I got a message on my cell phone from &quot;Joe,&quot; who claimed to be a marketing specialist in Los Angeles. &quot;We have a deal in mind for you,&quot; he promised. When I called back, Joe said he'd seen Crying, While Eating on the &quot;outrageous media&quot; server and thought it was &quot;fairly viral.&quot; He offered me a 60-40 split for placing ads on the site and asked if I was ready to &quot;play ball.&quot; I made a counteroffer of 95-5, contingent on his telling me where he got my cell phone number. He didn't call back.</p>
<p> <a>By the end </a> of May, the site had gotten 7.5 million hits. Blog entries mentioning the site appeared in <a href="http://www.bakje.nl/weblog/archives/2005/05/huilen_tijdens.html/t_blank">Dutch</a>, <a href="http://estrelaselimons.blogsome.com/2005/05/20/as-times-goes-by//t_blank">Galician</a>, <a href="http://spaces.msn.com/members/brunodelfrate/Blog/cns!1p7TI47qTTU41b7VpheVAhOg!752.entry/t_blank">Italian</a>, <a href="http://pagan.cisday.org/?p=50/t_blank">Turkish</a>, <a href="http://www.virtualtriviality.blogspot.com/2005/05/crying-while-eating.html/t_blank">Norwegian</a>, and <a href="http://217.172.178.173/nuc/index.php?itemid=4517/t_blank">German</a> (&quot;<em>das ist doof</em>&quot;). <a href="http://www.slate.com#correction">*</a> &nbsp;People submitted videos from all over the world. Gwenda from Australia <a href="http://www.cryingwhileeating.com/gwenda.html">cried over</a> &quot;the shameful mistreatment of animals&quot; while eating triple-chocolate ice cream. A guy from New Jersey sent <a href="http://www.cryingwhileeating.com/spencer.html">footage of himself</a> dressed up like a baby and crying over a plate of ribs. </p>
<p>Our egos swelled as we became D-list celebrities. An <a href="http://www.larissagoldston.com/exhibitions.aspx">art gallery</a> in New York requested videos for an upcoming exhibition, and a telecom company in Florida offered us thousands of dollars to put CwE clips in a commercial for long-distance service. Literary agents contacted us to discuss how the site could &quot;make the jump to print.&quot; We got mentioned on VH1 and in <em> <a href="http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/0,6115,1068468_7||451056_0_,00.html">Entertainment Weekly</a></em> and were invited to appear on countless radio shows. Crying, While Eating even crossed over to the world of Internet porn. We got a huge number of referrals from a site called Goregasm (&quot;where bones meet boners&quot;) and discovered that prospectors had snatched up the domain name www.cryingwhilemasturbating.com. The sex-themed blog Fleshbot called CwE &quot;our favorite new fetish of the year!&quot;</p>
<p>And, yes, my girlfriend's video wound up on a Japanese sex site. Sure, that was a bit awkward, but I took some consolation in the fact that, after just two weeks, CwE was the top result of a Google search for &quot;crying.&quot; I was a lock to win the $2,000 grand prize. I could make up for tossing my girlfriend to the Internet pervs by taking her out for a nice dinner. A really, really nice dinner.</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/media/2005/06/30_hannahpaul_110k.asf"><strong>Hannah/Paul</strong><em>What they're eating</em>: Tater Tots (her), cheese quesadilla (him). <em>What they're crying about</em>: The gulf between them can no longer be ignored.</a> Then my dot-com bubble burst. I'd been keeping on eye on a couple of our competitors, especially a <a href="http://thebrainfreeze.com/">video</a> of people chugging Slurpees at 7-Eleven and a <a href="http://ringtonedancer.contagiousmedia.org/">page</a> featuring a masked man who freaked out to cell-phone ringtones. In a blink, a site I'd hardly noticed surged ahead in the standings. <a href="http://www.forgetmenotpanties.com/">Forget-Me-Not Panties</a>, a hoax page that offered futuristic, GPS-enabled chastity belts to concerned husbands and fathers, had become enormously popular overseas. (The Japanese in particular couldn't get enough.) Pretty soon, a Google search for &quot;<a href="http://www.google.com/search?le=en&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;q=panties">panties</a>&quot; led directly to their site. Crying, While Eating had dropped to third on the &quot;<a href="http://www.google.com/search?le=en&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;q=crying">crying</a>&quot; list, right below the Hungarian prog-rock band <a href="http://www.aftercrying.com/">After Crying</a>. We'd peaked too early, the contagious-media version of Howard Dean.</p>
<p>The contest ended a week later—with Crying trailing Panties by more than 200,000 unique visitors. How had this happened? Hadn't anyone noticed the lovely write-ups in the <em>Ottawa Citizen </em>and the <em>Toronto Star</em>? Didn't anyone other than my parents watch us on <em>Best Week Ever</em>?</p>
<p>I pored over our traffic records to figure out what went wrong. Our television and radio spots hadn't really helped. All of that mainstream press came as we slid down from the contagious peak of our first few days. Newspaper articles didn't translate into lots of hits; all they did was lead to more print and television coverage. (The link I added to my <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> bio didn't help too much, either—it accounted for less than one-half of 1 percent of CwE's visitors.) Most of our traffic came from blog links and Web sites like College Humor and Something Awful. </p>
<p>It's easy to look back and see why Crying, While Eating did so well, at least for a time. It's a simple concept. It's interactive. It makes you laugh and feel uncomfortable at the same time. But there are two parts to contagious media. You have to make something that people want to spread around, but unless you're as lucky as the <em>Star Wars </em>kid you also have to do a little of the spreading yourself. CwE got lots of free publicity because it was an entry in a contest; if Casimir and I tried to make another contagious site, we'd have to do that legwork for ourselves. I don't know if we could pull it off. It seems like a real pain in the ass.</p>
<p>While the &quot;Panty Raiders&quot; took home the $2,000 jackpot, we did come away with two $1,000 awards. Crying, While Eating won Eyebeam's Alexa Prize as the first entrant to crack the Web's 20,000 most popular sites and the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">Creative Commons</a> Prize as the most-visited site covered by a free distribution license. Best of all, I got to take home a humongous, 4-foot-wide check. I thought about converting it into a coffee table, but I still owed my girlfriend a nice dinner. Now if I could only fit this thing through the front door at <a href="http://www.noburestaurants.com/">Nobu</a>.</p>
<p><em><strong> <a>Correction</a>, June 27, 2005:</strong> This piece originally and incorrectly stated that a blog post about Crying, While Eating was written in Portuguese. It's written in Galician, a dialect of Spanish. (<a href="http://www.slate.com#return">Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:15:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/06/crying_while_eating.htmlDaniel Engber2005-06-23T21:15:00ZMy sad, hungry climb to Internet stardom.TechnologyMy sad, hungry climb to Internet stardom.2121384Daniel EngberWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2121384falsefalsefalseMy sad, hungry climb to Internet stardom.My sad, hungry climb to Internet stardom.Internet2http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/06/internet2.html
<p> There's nothing obviously different or magical about Alan Crosswell's computer. The dirty, beige machine sits idle in a nondescript office at Columbia University, where Crosswell directs the school's computer network. Then he lets it loose. In just 2 minutes and 41 seconds, it pulls down more than 500 megabytes of Linux code from servers at Duke University, a task that would normally take hours. Next, Crosswell shows me a violin master class held via videoconference. The DVD-like resolution creates an immediacy that you don't get with choppy streaming video, and the better-than-CD audio allows both the teacher in Canada and the student in New York to hear every nuance.</p>
<p>How are these incredible feats of data transmission possible? Because Columbia has access to the other, better Internet—<a href="http://www.internet2.edu/">Internet2</a>.</p>
<p>Yes, there is another Internet. The term &quot;Internet&quot; simply refers to a network of computers. The one that most of us use is Internet1, or the &quot;commodity Internet.&quot; Internet2 was created nearly a decade ago by academics at research universities as a noncommercial prototype—something like what the Internet was back when just a few university researchers were logged on to <a href="http://www.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/en/arpanet.html">ARPANET</a>.</p>
<p>Like the commodity Internet, Internet2 comprises servers, routers, switches, and computers that are all connected together. Routers decide which way to send information, and servers handle Web site requests and store information for retrieval. What makes Internet2 so different is that it has many fewer users and much faster connections.</p>
<p>While Internet1 is open to pretty much anyone with a computer, access to Internet2 is limited to a select few, and its <a href="http://abilene.internet2.edu/">backbone</a> is made up entirely of large-capacity fiber-optic cables. Rather than Internet1, which is cobbled together out of old telephone lines, Internet2 was built for speed—the roads are all wide and smooth, like your own private autobahn. Internet2 moves data at 10 gigabits per second and more, compared with the 4 or so megabits you'll get using a cable modem. As a result, Internet2 moves data 100 to 1,000 times faster than the old-fashioned Internet.</p>
<p>More than 200 universities, 70 private companies, 45 government agencies, and 45 international organizations log on to Internet2 every day. Your work computer might be linked to Internet2 already—you can use <a href="http://detective.internet2.edu/">this Java applet</a> to find out. There are no secret Web addresses or special browsers required to log on, no buttons saying, &quot;Click here for Internet2.&quot; Organizations that want to join up must demonstrate a research-related purpose, pay dues, and meet minimum technical requirements so they don't slow down the rest of the Internet2 empire.</p>
<p>When you set up a super-fast Internet connection on a college campus, not everyone is going to use it for research. In the last two months, the RIAA has announced <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7476835/">two</a> <a href="http://news.com.com/RIAA+takes+new+shots+at+Internet2+swappers/2110-1027_3-5721864.html">separate</a> groups of lawsuits against students who allegedly shared music using an Internet2-specific file-sharing site called <a href="http://press.i2hub.com/">i2hub.com</a>. Wire reports on the lawsuits claim that an Internet2 connection allows you to download &quot;a DVD-quality copy of the popular movie <em>The Matrix</em> in 30 seconds.&quot; I didn't get a chance to try any field tests. When I tried to persuade Columbia's Crosswell to let me download a couple of movies for my personal collection, he politely declined. </p>
<p>So, will Internet2 be the downfall of the music and film industries? Probably not. Those 30-second download speeds you're reading about are theoretical. Some universities put caps on how much data individual users can transfer, or how fast they can send and receive data on certain computers. Plus, the hardware in most home computers—the network cards, for example—isn't fast enough to keep up with Internet2 speeds. </p>
<p>The RIAA isn't completely safe, though. Not too far in the future, cable companies will probably sell Internet2-like download speeds to home users. However, most people won't ever use Internet2 itself. </p>
<p>Internet2 was never designed to replace the Internet most of us are using now. It's more like a beach or a restaurant—great when not too many people know about it, frustrating when everybody and his mother starts to show up. Internet2's promoters like to compare it to early research networks that fostered the creation of canonical apps like the World Wide Web and e-mail. So, even if you never use Internet2 to download movies<em></em>at hyperspeed, you still might benefit from the research. Let's just hope they let us use e-mail2.</p>Tue, 07 Jun 2005 17:45:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/06/internet2.htmlAlexander Russo2005-06-07T17:45:00ZIt's better, it's faster. You can't use it.TechnologyThe better, faster Internet you can't use.2120440Alexander RussoWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2120440falsefalsefalseThe better, faster Internet you can't use.The better, faster Internet you can't use.Galaxy Questhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/05/galaxy_quest.html
<p> It's too bad Douglas Adams wasn't able to see his vision brought to life. I don't mean the so-so <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2117676/">movie version</a> of <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</em>. I'm talking about <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>, the Web's own don't-panic guide to everything.</p>
<p>The parallels between <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide</em> (as found in Adams' original <a href="http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/hitchhikers.html">BBC radio series</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345453743">novels</a>) and Wikipedia are so striking, it's a wonder that the author's rabid fans don't think he invented time travel. Since its editor was perennially out to lunch, the <em>Guide</em> was amended &quot;by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing.&quot; This anonymous group effort ends up outselling <em>Encyclopedia Galactica</em> even though &quot;it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.&quot; </p>
<p>Adams actually launched <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/">his own online guide</a> before he died in 2001, but it was, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A550955">he wrote</a>, &quot;still a little like the fossil record in that it consists almost entirely of gaps.&quot; Wikipedia is a colossal improvement—it's just like the fictional <em>Hitchhiker's Guide</em>, only nerdier. Wikipedia is the Web fetishist's ideal data structure: It's free, it's open-source, and it features a 4,000-word exegesis of <em> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)">Dune</a></em>. </p>
<p>For decades, software-makers competed to build complex collaboration systems. These high-end tools, like Lotus Notes, let companies specify who can edit which documents and establish complex approval procedures for changes. In 1995, software researcher Ward Cunningham destroyed the hierarchies by designing a site, the <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb">WikiWikiWeb</a>, that anyone could edit. (<em>Wiki-wiki</em> means &quot;quick quick&quot; in Hawaiian. Cunningham saw it on a Honolulu Airport <a href="http://www.idblog.org/archives/000462.html">bus</a>.) </p>
<p>Wikipedia, with more than 1 million entries in at least 10 languages, is the mother of all wikis, but there are also wikis devoted to <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Main_Page">quotations</a>, the city of <a href="http://seattlewiki.org/wiki/Main_Page">Seattle</a>, and <a href="http://wiki.politics.ie/index.php?title=Main_Page">Irish politics</a>. (Check out this <a href="http://www.worldwidewiki.net/wiki/SwitchWiki">wiki of wikis</a>, which lists more than 1,000 sites.) Instead of enforcing rules, wikis trust that groups can behave. Anyone can edit or reorganize their contents. If you realize something's missing, incomplete, or incorrect, you can fix it yourself without asking permission. &quot;People told me that the experience changed their lives,&quot; Cunningham said via e-mail. </p>
<p>Don't expect Wikipedia to change your life, though, unless you've secretly longed to be an encyclopedia editor. Just because you give everyone read and write permissions doesn't mean everyone will use them. Wiki lovers argue that they are collaborative, self-correcting, <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiNow">living documents</a> that evolve to hold the sum of all the knowledge of their users. But, like blogging, editing the Net's encyclopedia appeals to a small, enthusiastic demographic.</p>
<p>Like the <em>Guide</em>'s lengthy entries on drinking, Wikipedia mirrors the interests of its writers rather than its readers. You'll find more on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot">Slashdot</a> than <em> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker">The New Yorker</a></em>. The entry for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow">Cory Doctorow</a> is three times as long as the one for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._L._Doctorow">E.L. Doctorow</a>. Film buffs have yet to post a page on <em> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Through_a_Glass_Darkly&amp;action=edit">Through a Glass Darkly</a></em>; they're too busy tweaking the seven-part entry on <em> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(movie)">Tron</a></em>. </p>
<p>But excessive nerdiness isn't what's keeping Wikipedia from becoming the Net's killer resource. Accuracy is. In a <em>Wired </em>feature story, Daniel Pink (kind of) <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki_pr.html">praised the hulking encyclopedia</a> by saying you can &quot;[l]ook up any topic you know something about and you'll probably find that the Wikipedia entry is, if not perfect, not bad.&quot; But don't people use encyclopedias to look up stuff they <em>don't</em> know anything about? Even if a reference tool is 98 percent right, it's not useful if you don't know which 2 percent is wrong. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_(magazine)">entry</a> for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>, for instance, claims that several freelance writers are &quot;columnists on staff&quot; and still lists Cyrus Krohn as publisher months after the Washington Post Co.'s Cliff Sloan took over.</p>
<p>Just because the Wikipedia elves will <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slate_%28magazine%29&amp;action=history">probably fix those errors</a> by the time you read this article doesn't mean that the system is inherently self-healing. Not everyone who uses a wiki wants to hit from both sides of the plate. The subset of enthusiastic writers and editors is orders of magnitude smaller than the group of passive readers who'll never get around to contributing anything. <br /><br /></p>
<p>Bashing<em></em>Wikipedia is nearly as risky as bashing Scientology. I know that I'm going to get barraged by the Wikivangelists—&quot;If an entry's wrong,&quot; they'll say, &quot;stop complaining about it and fix it.&quot; But if I were truly conscientious, I'd have to stop and edit something almost every time I use Wikipedia. Most people are like Douglas Adams' characters—we resolve firmly to stay and fix it after work then forget the whole episode by lunchtime. Wikipedia is a good first stop to get the basics in a hurry, especially for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX">tech</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_umlaut">pop culture</a> topics that probably won't ever make it into <em>Britannica</em>. I'm just careful not to use it to settle bar bets or as source material for an article. I made that mistake exactly once.</p>
<p>Wikis are a great way to collect group knowledge, but not every reference book in the galaxy will turn into one. A couple of weeks ago, <a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/08/1658247&amp;mode=nocomment">online reports</a> claimed that Microsoft's Encarta decided to wikify its paltry 42,000 entries. Encarta's Editorial Director Gary Alt told me that the truth is prosaic. Readers will be able to <a href="http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/support/EncartaFeedback.aspx?page=editing">submit</a> suggested corrections or improvements to existing entries, but Encarta is not looking for new entries, and <a href="http://spaces.msn.com/members/Encarta/Blog/cns!1pKov6pW19gvfZD4bZjOEp7A!179.entry">the editors will still decide</a> what's worth including.</p>
<p>An elitist encyclopedia like Encarta will never be able to match the breadth or speed of a user-edited reference library, but it's smart to coax readers into helping stretch its inherent advantage—reliability. Alt told me he's hiring all of six people to review and research reader submissions. Unlike the editor of <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide</em>, they'll probably be eating lunch at their desks.</p>Tue, 03 May 2005 21:37:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/05/galaxy_quest.htmlPaul Boutin2005-05-03T21:37:00ZWikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise.TechnologyWikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide.2117942Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2117942falsefalsefalseWikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide.Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide.The Hitchhiker's&nbsp;Guide to Planet Earth?May the Force Be With You, and You, and You&nbsp;...http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/04/may_the_force_be_with_you_and_you_and_you.html
<p> Good news, <em>Star Wars </em> buffs. There's a new movie out this spring—and it <em>isn't </em> by George Lucas. The 40-minute, fan-made <em> <a href="http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations.html">Star Wars Revelations</a></em> cost a mere $20,000. It's also just as good as—and often quite better than—the cringe-inducing <em>Star Wars</em> movies of recent years. Indeed, it's so artistically successful that it suggests a radical idea: Maybe Lucas should step aside and let the fans take over.</p>
<p>Our most cherished sci-fi franchises are in a creative trough. Lucas' movies have spiraled into unwatchability; Paramount has so exhausted its ideas for <em>Star Trek</em> that it's <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/302351p-258821c.html">folding up its tent</a> and going home. The fans, in contrast, still give a damn: The director of <em>Revelations</em>, <a href="http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/fanzine/fanzine_files/01/feature101.html">Shane Felux</a>, is clearly more knowledgeable about the strengths and weaknesses of the material than Lucas himself. <a href="http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/images/REVELATIONS_OFFICIAL_POSTER.jpg">Felux's movie</a><em></em>retains the funky vibe of the original <em>Star Wars, </em>down to the kitschy, '70s-style wipes, the obligatory scene in an alien bar, and Darth Vader's throat-choking technique. Better yet, it jettisons Lucas' most loathed innovations—neither Jar Jar Binks nor any Ewoks make an appearance. Fans may be pointy-headed and obsessed with useless trivia, but they have excellent bullshit detectors. </p>
<p>The fans can also give <a href="http://www.ilm.com/">Industrial Light and Magic</a> a run for its money. When it comes to special effects, <em>Revelations </em>is nothing short of astonishing. Early on, there's a jaw-dropping chase scene in which the heroes' ship darts like a nimble fish through a cluttered space-yard, a fleet of TIE fighters in hot pursuit. Later, a stunning attack on an Empire Destroyer left me laughing in sheer surprise.</p>
<p>How could Felux produce scenes this good? Because desktop animation and editing programs like <a href="http://bryce.daz3d.com/55index.php">Bryce</a> and <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/main.html">Adobe Premiere Pro</a> allow anyone to blow up a CGI spacecraft on a garage-band budget. What's more, Felux relied on the techniques of open-source design. Hundreds of people worldwide offered small bits of work, purely for the love of the project—and a chance to brag about their contribution. Felux wrangled free labor from over 30 CGI artists, including one supremely talented <a href="http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/fanzine/fanzine_files/10/feature1002.html">16-year-old kid</a> who lists his occupation as &quot;being awesome.&quot; For live-action shots, Felux convinced unpaid actors and crew members to drive out to weekend shoots. When he needed uniforms for Storm Troopers and X-wing pilots, he <a href="http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/fanzine/fanzine_files/10/pickups/pickups.html">borrowed them from fans who made their own.</a></p>
<p> Fan-made art is also easier to distribute than ever before. The proliferation of broadband in the past few years means that a movie doesn't have to open on 3,000 screens to get seen by millions of eyeballs. In only one week online, an estimated 1,000,000 people have already downloaded <em>Star Wars Revelations</em>. You can get the movie for free <a href="http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations_movie.html">from various online sites</a> or by using <a href="http://www.bittorrent.com/">BitTorrent</a> —don't worry, it's a legal download. BitTorrent in particular is so efficient in its use of bandwidth that I downloaded the entire 252-megabyte movie in around 12 minutes. (That's probably because 99 percent of the geeks who are into fan-created sci-fi are using BitTorrent.)</p>
<p>George Lucas has always <a href="http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/spotlight/collections/starwars/">encouraged <em>Star Wars&shy;</em>-inspired<em></em>fan movies</a>, so long as the wannabe auteurs didn't try to make a profit. (That's the case with Felux—he isn't selling his movie or any associated merchandise.) Lucas should do more, though. Once he stops polluting the world with prequels, he should slap a liberal &quot;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a>&quot; copyright license on the <em>Star Wars</em> franchise. That would explicitly allow any fan to remix an existing movie, or create a new one in homage, so long as there's no profit involved. Everyone wins: Movies like <em>Revelations</em> keep the fan base alive, and Lucas can continue selling figurines until the sun explodes.</p>
<p>This open-source method won't work for every defunct cultural property. Fan art works best when it feeds off of dweeby universes that are jam-packed with characters. It would be easy to create amateur, offshoot films based on <em>Lord of the Rings</em> or <em>The Twilight Zone</em>, and possibly even a show with a revolving-door cast like <em>Law &amp; Order</em>. Shows or movies that rely on a single, charismatic actor—like Sarah Michelle Gellar in <em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer—</em>aren't as easy to replicate. But <em>Buffy </em>fans could simply create spinoffs, the way <em>Buffy</em>'s<em></em>creator churned out a series of <a href="http://www.buffycollector.com/comics/fray.shtml">comic books starring other teen slayers</a>.</p>
<p>All fan-created movies still face two big stumbling blocks: scriptwriting and acting. Even something as polished as <em>Revelations </em>is occasionally marred by a boilerplate plot and wooden acting. (Though that might make the homage all the more authentic given the hollowness of Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman in <em>Attack of the Clones</em>.) The amateurs, it seems, cannot escape the artistic trap that ensnares big-budget sci-fi auteurs. When you fall in love with CGI effects, sometimes you forget how to deal with those quaint, un-animated properties we call &quot;actors.&quot;</p>Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:11:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/04/may_the_force_be_with_you_and_you_and_you.htmlClive Thompson2005-04-29T20:11:00ZWhy fans make better Star Wars movies than George Lucas.TechnologyMay the force be with you, and you, and you&nbsp;...2117760Clive ThompsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2117760falsefalsefalseMay the force be with you, and you, and you ...May the force be with you, and you, and you ...Light saber: sine qua nonThe Archivisthttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/04/the_archivist.html
<p> I'm a few minutes late for lunch at the <a href="http://www.archive.org/">Internet Archive</a>, but they know what kept me. The view of San Francisco Bay outside the archive's digs at the <a href="http://www.nps.gov/prsf/">Presidio</a> is captivating even if you already live here. Just up the road, the Golden Gate Bridge rises, impossibly huge and unbelievably beautiful, to straddle the bay. (Check out the <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=116+Sheridan+Avenue,94129&amp;spn=0.05845069885253906,0.05278587341308594&amp;t=k&amp;hl=en">satellite photo</a> if you're prepared to weep with envy.) The wraparound splendor inspires fanciful thought. No wonder Gene Roddenberry conjured the Starfleet Academy right where I'm standing.</p>
<p>Thanks to the ruthless hippies who run local politics, the Presidio's former Army barracks are filled by nonprofits rather than condos. Search-engine wiz and dot-com multimillionaire <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle">Brewster Kahle</a> founded the archive here in 1996 with a dream as big as the bridge: He wanted to back up the Internet. There were only 50 million or so URLs back then, so the idea only seemed half-crazy. As the Web ballooned to more than 10 billion pages, the archive's main server farm—hidden across town in a <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=60+Federal,San+Francisco,+CA&amp;spn=0.030212,0.049524&amp;t=k&amp;hl=en">data center</a> beneath the city's other big bridge—grew to hold a half-million gigabytes of compressed and indexed pages. </p>
<p>Kahle is less the Internet's crazy aunt—the tycoon who can't stand to throw anything away—than its evangelical librarian. &quot;The history of digital materials in companies' hands is one of … <em>loss</em>,&quot; he tells me in a rushed meeting. Like it or not, the Web is the world's library now, and Kahle doesn't trust the guys who shelve the books. They're obsessed with posting new pages, not preserving old ones. Every day, Kahle laments, mounds of data get purged from the Web: government documents, personal sites, corporate communications, message boards, news reports that weren't printed on paper. For most surfers, once a page disappears from Google's cache it no longer exists. </p>
<p>Instead of creating another startup that crawls the Web to make money, Brewster used his millions to preserve as much knowledge as possible and—just as important—make it accessible to anyone who can get to a computer. The archive's <a href="http://www.archive.org/web/web.php">Wayback Machine</a> has captured only a fraction of the Internet's history, but it still holds 40 billion pages from 50 million sites. With a couple of clicks, you can revisit CNN's <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030320060210/http:/www4.cnn.com/">home page</a> from the day the U.S. began bombing Iraq and learn that <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19970403013441/http:/www.salon.com/">salon.com</a> was once a hairdressers' site. </p>
<p>As a time-travel device, the Wayback Machine is far from perfect. Many sites blocked Kahle from crawling them—thanks for nothing, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/www.hotwired.com">Hotwired</a>—and lots of copyrighted material has been removed at the owner's request. You can search old nytimes.com front pages, for instance, but the articles themselves are locked up in the <em>Times</em>' paid archive. My biggest gripe is that there's no way to run a simple keyword search over all 40 billion pages. Instead, you have to type in a <a href="http://web.archive.org/collections/web/advanced.html">specific URL and a date range</a> and then click through a list of preserved copies of that page. Maybe someday they'll add a search box, but serving queries on a Web cache five times the size of Google's would take lots more hardware than what they've got under the bridge.</p>
<p>The Internet Archive isn't just the Wayback Machine—the nonprofit's two dozen or so employees have filled an equal amount of disk space with uploaded film collections, presidential debates, Bugs Bunny <a href="http://www.archive.org/movies/collection.php?collection=classic_cartoons">cartoons</a>, and news broadcasts from the Middle East. The archive is especially keen on books. They've scanned about 25,000 of them so far as part of the <a href="http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/MBP_FAQ.html">Million Book Project</a>, a collaboration with Indian and Chinese agencies to create an online library in the place of bricks-and-mortar reading rooms. </p>
<p>I test out the books project by spending an afternoon searching, reading, and printing pages from old tomes like Dion Clayton's <em>English Costume</em>, a 1907 coffee-table book on Brit dandies through the ages. Some of the scans look like awkward, off-center Xeroxes, but other ones let you search inside, just like on Amazon.com, or cut and paste passages into your homework. You'd better spell-check that homework, though. When I copy a passage from Clayton's book that begins, &quot;Here you see the coat,&quot; it comes out as, &quot;Here $'ou see tlae coat.&quot;</p>
<p>In cost and complexity, scanning a million books is as big a challenge as hosting a million gigabytes (they designed <a href="http://www.capricorn-tech.com/">custom servers</a> to solve that problem). Cheap is the watchword for everything here. I sit in on a demo of a home-brew book scanner designed to cost a fraction of automated <a href="http://www.kirtas-tech.com/main.asp?section_id=17&amp;page_id=17">commercial</a> <a href="http://www.4digitalbooks.com/">models</a>. It's a black-curtained box about 4 square feet, with two store-bought digital SLR cameras hung to point at the pages of a book cradled below. Software on a nearby workstation turns the photos into XML-enhanced files that go into a searchable, sharable database.</p>
<p>The final step in building the archive into a true global library: getting you to contribute. <a href="http://ourmedia.org/">Ourmedia</a>, a project launched two weeks ago, offers free, unlimited, permanent storage of your videos, photos, Word files, podcasts—anything that's not porn and not covered by someone else's copyright. The one catch: The files, stored on Internet Archive servers, will be freely available to anyone in the world.</p>
<p>Sure, you could store your files for free—and in private—in your Gmail account or share your photos on <a href="http://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a>. But Kahle thinks you should trust him, not Internet companies that have a habit of disappearing along with their customers' data. Remember MP3.com? After convincing thousands of indie bands to create pages and upload music, the site's owners sold the company and <a href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/11/21/14616/561">the whole thing got trashed</a> on short notice. Google may have a zillion dollars, a do-gooder management team, and a wide-open future, but the same was once true of Netscape.</p>
<p>An A-list of <a href="http://ourmedia.org/about/advisory-board">big-brain bloggers</a> like Lawrence Lessig and Howard Rheingold is supplying the ideas for Ourmedia, but Kahle's superfat server setup is what makes the whole thing possible. After a day at the archive, I have no doubts about his sincerity or his team's dedication. What I worry about is his $5 million budget—that's a lot closer to mine than to Google's. And I wonder who could replace Kahle's brains, drive, and connections if he gets hit by a Presidio bus. The archive has already outlasted both MP3.com and Netscape, though. Maybe that's because, unlike the other guys, Kahle planned on nonprofitability from the start.</p>Thu, 07 Apr 2005 17:39:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/04/the_archivist.htmlPaul Boutin2005-04-07T17:39:00ZBrewster Kahle made a copy of the Internet. Now, he wants your files.TechnologyThe Internet Archive wants your files.2116329Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2116329falsefalsefalseThe Internet Archive wants your files.The Internet Archive wants your files.The Perfect Wormhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/03/the_perfect_worm.html
<p> A year ago, I visited some of Europe's <a href="http://vx.netlux.org/29a/">top virus writers</a>. These guys wrote everything from mass-mailing worms to &quot;keyloggers,&quot; programs that infect your desktop and record every keystroke. I asked them what they wanted to do next—what big targets loomed for virus hackers who had done everything. Each had the same answer: mobile phones.</p>
<p>Two weeks ago, antivirus companies discovered <a href="http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/commwarrior.shtml">CommWarrior</a>, the first significant mobile-phone worm to be released &quot;in the wild.&quot; The previous phone viruses you might have heard about were all pretty harmless. <a href="http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/epoc.cabir.html">Cabir</a>, which also made the news last month, uses Bluetooth to hop from one phone to others physically nearby. As <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2113909/">explained</a>, that technique limits the virus's ability to spread quickly—for Cabir to propagate, it has to be within 30 feet of a vulnerable Bluetooth phone. </p>
<p>CommWarrior is far more contagious. When it invades your phone, the worm rifles through your contacts list and mails a copy of itself to victims as a &quot;multimedia message.&quot; That's a classic social-engineering trick: When a message comes from a friend, you're much more likely to open it and get infected. Besides passing itself along to the next guy, CommWarrior doesn't do much. The virus' only payload is a flashing message—&quot;OTMOP03KAM HET!&quot;—that translates as &quot;No to brain-deads!&quot; in Russian.</p>
<p>While CommWarrior isn't particularly dangerous, it is unsettling. Since you can send &quot;multimedia messages&quot; to compatible phones worldwide, this virus can spread more widely and more quickly than Cabir. (CommWarrior attacks smartphones that run Symbian's &quot;Series 60&quot; operating system, such as Nokia's 7610 or the N-Gage.) What's really unsettling is that a fast-spreading mobile virus could cost you money.</p>
<p>Several security officials told me that a scam artist could write a worm that invades your phone, waits patiently until 4 a.m., then makes an hourlong call to an overseas phone-sex line that bills you by the minute. Sure, you could call your mobile carrier and plead that you didn't make the call, but you'll just seem like another in-denial porn hound. Pay up, pervert. Of course, once the scam became public, the FBI or some other government agency could try to shut the phone line down. But a scam like that only needs to operate for an hour to collect plenty of phone fees. And if the line is located in Russia or China—where most of today's criminal viruses emerge—it could be almost impossible to shut it down quickly.</p>
<p>A worm like CommWarrior needs help to get its hooks into your phone. The mangled English subject lines—which include such gems as &quot;Free SEX! Free *SEX* software for you!&quot;—are a dead giveaway that you shouldn't click. But the fact that you're getting a saucy message on your phone rather than your computer will no doubt induce many clicks, simply because people will be curious or just won't believe phone viruses are real.</p>
<p>Though no phone-sex-dialing cell-phone worms have yet emerged, there are precedents in the PC world—so-called &quot; <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1110878,00.asp">rogue dialers</a>&quot; that reprogram modems to call expensive pay-per-call lines. Last year, a mobile virus called <a href="http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/trojan.mos.html">Mosquito</a> started inducing handsets to send text messages to high-cost numbers. Fortunately, it didn't spread.</p>
<p>Phone executives like to say that it's easy for them to contain worms because their networks are gated communities. Verizon and Sprint can install antivirus software on their servers to automatically delete infected multimedia messages before they reach their victims. And if they notice that thousands of customers call the same phone-sex number at 4 a.m., they could simply interrupt those calls.</p>
<p>But that's no help if the worm is designed to be slow and stealthy. Instead of calling a pay-per-call number every night at 4 a.m., the virus could make short, infrequent calls that most customers wouldn't notice on their phone bills. The top identity-theft scammers already use this below-the-radar technique with credit cards and bank accounts. People are lazy—so long as their monthly bill isn't too out of whack, they'll usually pay up.</p>
<p>If they have all this money-making potential, why haven't mobile-phone worms become an epidemic? Because the complex kind of viruses that can take over your phone can only run on sophisticated operating systems. Right now, only about 2 percent of all handsets are smartphones—too small a number to attract the attention of lots of virus authors. There are also so many brands of phones running so many different operating systems that it's impossible to write a single virus that can infect them all—we're protected by biodiversity.</p>
<p>The percentage of smartphones is growing rapidly, though, with Microsoft and Symbian each vying to create the single, standard cell-phone operating<strong></strong>system. A monocultured world of smartphone handsets would be a virus-writer's dream—a single, massively popular piece of software to poke and prod for weaknesses and insecurities. Even worse, as Symbian, Microsoft, and their competitors stuff more whiz-bang capabilities into phones, security will suffer. It's the iron law of programming: The more ambitious the software, the more gaping holes. Once smartphones have complex enough operating systems, it won't be hard to write a worm that burrows in, harvests all your info, and squirts it out to a mailbox in Pakistan. That's precisely what virulent computer worms like <a href="http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sobig.f@mm.html">Sobig</a> and <a href="http://antivirus.about.com/library/weekly/aa093002a.htm">Bugbear</a> do.</p>
<p>The mobile-phone industry could solve the viral problem by developing an open-source, Linux-style cellular operating system. But that's about as likely as Motorola and Nokia announcing that all your cell phone calls are going to be free. For now at least, the burden falls on you. If your phone starts offering you &quot;Free SEX!&quot;, be strong enough to say no.</p>
<p><em></em></p>
<p>Thanks to Mikko H. Hypp&ouml;nen of F-Secure, Vincent Weaver of Symantec, Tom Pekar of Verizon Wireless, Rich Blasi of Cingular Wireless, and Greg Mastoras of Sophos.</p>Tue, 22 Mar 2005 12:20:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/03/the_perfect_worm.htmlClive Thompson2005-03-22T12:20:00ZComing soon, a cell-phone virus that will wreck your life.TechnologyHow cell-phone viruses will wreck your life.2115118Clive ThompsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2115118falsefalsefalseHow cell-phone viruses will wreck your life.How cell-phone viruses will wreck your life.Newsmashinghttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/03/newsmashing.html
<p>Editors and relatives often ask me if there's an application that lets you scrawl notes on a Web page. Instead of e-mailing a link to a news story, you could circle what you think is important before passing it on; rather than bookmarking a page, you could slap on a sticky note. The funny thing is, that kind of Web page annotation software has been around since <a href="http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/help-on-annotate-win.html">before Netscape</a>. Yet hardly anyone uses it, and none of the top browser makers has embraced it.</p>
<p>In 2001, Microsoft bought <a href="http://www.kottke.org/00/09/the-equill-web-toolbar-ie">Web page markup technology</a> from a company called <a href="http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/09/22/edit.e.quill.idg/">E-Quill</a> but hasn't incorporated any of its features into Internet Explorer. The <a href="http://www.imarkup.com/">iMarkup</a> toolbar, which debuted to <a href="http://www.imarkup.com/press/awards.asp">rave reviews</a> in 2000, hasn't gotten much buzz since. You can still <a href="http://www.imarkup.com/download/">get iMarkup</a>—a 30-day trial is free and it costs $39.95 if you want to keep it after that. One <a href="http://www.imarkup.com/products/annotate_page.asp">screenshot</a> says it all: You can highlight parts of a page, post sticky notes, draw freehand, and insert arrows, links, file attachments, and sound bites. Taking notes on the <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> home page won't change what other surfers see. But when you revisit the page, iMarkup will remember what you wrote and slap your notes atop the live site. In one simple step, you can e-mail your annotations (or a screenshot of your annotations) to a friend. Using a free iMarkup plug-in, they can then view your notes overlaid atop the live site. </p>
<p>After playing around with iMarkup for just five minutes, I was convinced that it's a useful tool. But after a few more days of tinkering, I realized that Web page annotation has flopped because it doesn't offer a compelling reason to change how we use computers. You could take notes in iMarkup, but it's more straightforward to jot down your thoughts in Word. You could also use it to collaborate with colleagues, but it's easier to send an e-mail or instant message. Then it hit me—there <em>is</em> a compelling reason to scribble on Web pages and news stories. This is the killer app for political bloggers.</p>
<p>Every killer app needs a killer name. Creating a new product by writing all over somebody else's article is kind of like <a href="http://newyorker.com/critics/music/?050110crmu_music">making a mash-up</a>. Let's call it newsmashing—that's just nerdy enough to catch on.</p>
<p>Why is newsmashing better than today's blogging techniques? Currently, political bloggers write a post by taking a snippet from a news story, an op-ed column, or another blog post. Then, they copy, paste, and indent the most partisan, disingenuous, and inaccurate passage onto their own blog and add a bulletproof rebuttal right below. The problem with this technique is that it makes the readers do all the work. First, they need to pop the original piece open in another window to &quot;<a href="http://instapundit.com/archives/021755.php">read the whole thing</a>.&quot; After that, they have to flip back and forth between the original and the rebuttal to make sure the blogger isn't getting the facts wrong, leaving out a key detail, or quoting something out of context. Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to read blogs if you could look at the critique and the original argument at the same time?</p>
<p>Think back to college. When you got a term paper back, it only took a few seconds to spot your transgressions—all you had to do was look for bright red ink, passages highlighted in yellow, or the dreaded &quot;See me&quot; sticky note. You didn't have to flip back and forth—you could read the whole thing, as it were, in one stomach-twisting glance. The one advantage of my Jurassic day job as a print magazine writer is that when<em></em>my editor scrawls &quot;HUH?&quot; across an entire paragraph, I don't have to click any hyperlinks to get the point.</p>
<p>How would bloggers use a tool like iMarkup? Take a look at this screenshot of my markup of Josh Levin's recent <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> piece on <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2113913/">rappers and bloggers</a>. Typing an all-text rebuttal would have been tedious. First, I'd have to spell out Levin's failure to note his conflicts of interest rather than just marking the holes on the page. Then, unless I posted his entire piece in my blog, you'd have to take my word for it that he never figures out the difference between &quot;bloggers&quot; and &quot;political bloggers.&quot; But with iMarkup, I can just circle his own words on his own page—no more &quot;out of context&quot; alibis.</p>
<p>You might think newsmashing will turn the political blogosphere into one big, graffiti-strewn bathroom stall. If you've ever watched the left and right edit each other's Wikipedia entries, you know how annoying that can get. Just this second, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bush">George W. Bush</a> is defined as &quot;the current President of the United States who is secretly plotting the downfall of America.&quot; He'll probably be &quot;the architect of global democracy&quot; by the time you click. But I think bloggers are capable of more than mental table tennis.&nbsp;I expect something at least as entertainingly infuriating as the <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/paglia.html">Camille Paglia interview</a> &nbsp;that ran in the first issue of <em>Wired</em>—with Paglia's angry, handwritten corrections slathered on top. If she had just typed up a polite rebuttal, it would've been buried on the Letters page.</p>
<p>Even if newsmashing does prove itself to be a worthwhile form of communication, the software will have to get a whole lot better for leading-edge tech bloggers to embrace it. Instead of iMarkup's plug-in format, newsmashing applications should use standard HTML. That way, bloggers will be able to mash each other from their Treos and Sidekicks; Google and, better yet, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fslate.msn.com%2Fid%2F2113913%2F">Technorati</a> will search the results. Also, no one company can own the technology. If there's a monopoly, geeks will <a href="http://www.thetwowayweb.com/2005/02/22">bash it</a>, not mash it. </p>
<p>Along with the tech hurdles, newsmashers will certainly face legal roadblocks. The founders of iMarkup told me they've never received any complaints about their product. They also told me they've never investigated the legality of marking up a copyrighted page and posting it for other people to look at. Can you publish a complete version of someone else's article, plus your notes, without risking a copyright lawsuit? Google's <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2114308/">AutoLink feature</a> tries to solve this problem by modifying only the local copies of Web pages. But lawyers I talked to said an angry publisher could still sue. The <em>New York Times</em> probably won't buy the argument that it's &quot;fair use&quot; to host a mashed version of a news story on your blog.</p>
<p>There's no doubt that when newsmashing takes off, the mainstream media will not be amused. But maybe newspaper mash-up artists will follow the career path of music mashers. At first, record labels tried to sue them out of existence. Now, they court <a href="http://www.davidbowie.com/neverFollow/">mashers as trend-setting viral marketers</a>. The <em>Times </em>has a chance to leap ahead of the curve. When <a href="http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000837582">Daniel Okrent leaves</a> on May 31, the <em>NYT </em>should hire <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/">Josh Marshall</a> or <a href="http://www.andrewsullivan.com/">Andrew Sullivan</a> to remix the paper of record. Who needs a public editor when you can have a public newsmasher?</p>Tue, 15 Mar 2005 13:49:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/03/newsmashing.htmlPaul Boutin2005-03-15T13:49:00ZThe new technique that will change blogging forever.TechnologyThe new technique that will change blogging forever.2114791Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2114791falsefalsefalseThe new technique that will change blogging forever.The new technique that will change blogging forever.Click on image to expandWhen Good Search Engines Go Badhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/03/when_good_search_engines_go_bad.html
<p> Has Google turned evil? Web pundit Dave Winer <a href="http://www.thetwowayweb.com/2005/02/22">calls</a> the search behemoth's new AutoLink feature &quot;the first step down a treacherous slope that could spell the end of the Web.&quot; ZDNet's Steve Gillmor <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/index.php?m=20050301">says</a> it's &quot;a pure land grab.&quot; Slashdot <a href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/20/1926227">chimes in</a> with the ultimate insult: &quot;Is Google AutoLink Patent-Pending By Microsoft?&quot;</p>
<p>What's all the hubbub about? A couple of little blue links. AutoLink is part of the new beta version of the <a href="http://toolbar.google.com/">Google toolbar</a>. It's possible to disable AutoLink with a single mouse click, but if you do keep it turned on the toolbar will crawl each page you surf for mailing addresses, book ISBN numbers, auto VIN numbers, and package tracking numbers. If a restaurant publishes its address, Google links that to a map. If an author's Web site lists her books by ISBN number, each one becomes a link to Amazon's page for the book. Why only this oddball collection of items? Because they can be reliably identified and have only one correct match. Google won't try to link &quot;Paul Boutin&quot; to anything because it can't distinguish between me and <a href="http://www.mmguide.musicmatch.com/album/album.cgi?ALBUMID=531313">Mariah Carey's recording engineer</a>.</p>
<p>Is Google using its huge market share to edit people's Web pages without consent? Not according to U.S. copyright law. Once you download digital content—a Web page—onto your computer, it's yours to mess with as you please as long as you don't redistribute it. As Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow explains, AutoLink is like a <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/26/why_you_should_love_.html">remix tool</a>: It won't replace an existing link with one of its own, but it does insert new links that the page's author might have overlooked. Moreover, Google swears up and down that it's not making any money from the companies it links to (Amazon, Carfax, MapQuest). Nope, it's just offering a free tool that you might find helpful. That argument didn't go over well at Barnes &amp; Noble, which discovered that AutoLink was inserting links to Amazon.com on&nbsp;BN.com book pages. </p>
<p>So, is AutoLink good or evil? Try it for yourself: Click <a href="http://toolbar.google.com/T3/index">here</a> &nbsp;to install the toolbar on your PC. Skip the options to make Google your default search engine and to enable advanced features. (If you want to uninstall the toolbar later, go to the Control Panel and select Add or Remove Programs.) </p>
<p>Once you have the Google toolbar installed, reload this page and look for the grayed-out &quot;AutoLink&quot; button. Now, click <a href="http://www.paulboutin.com/PaulBoutin.html">here</a> to look at my r&eacute;sum&eacute;. My address in the upper right corner of the page hasn't turned into a link, but the AutoLink button has changed to &quot;Look for Map.&quot; Click the button, and voil&aacute;—AutoLink modifies the local copy of the page to turn the address into a link to <a href="http://maps.google.com/">Google Maps</a>. Give a click and you can see where I live. Now, is that really so terrible?</p>
<p>Microsoft tested a similar feature called <a href="http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20010607.html">Smart Tags</a> four years ago that linked the names of companies, sports teams, and colleges to sites Microsoft picked. They yanked it after three weeks of howling complaints that they were editing the Web. But there are a couple of big differences between Smart Tags and Google's link inserter. Smart Tags were built into Internet Explorer; they also automatically edited every page you visited. AutoLink comes on a toolbar that users choose to download. There's also no automatic editing—you have to click on the toolbar every time you want it to add links to a page. <a href="http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050216-124431">Many such programs</a> have been available since the 1990s without drawing much flak. </p>
<p>The real issue isn't AutoLink; it's Google's ever-growing clout as the $50 billion monolith of search. &quot;What Google isn't taking into account is that its market power, and the tendency of users to accept the default … will tend to create Google's version of the Web, not the users' version,&quot; <a href="http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/02/google_toolbar_.html">writes</a> veteran tech journalist Dan Gillmor. And he's got a point, considering that five out of six grown Americans <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66374,00.html">can't tell search results from ads</a>.</p>
<p>I don't think Google is evil for naively launching this feature. I do think they'll be an accessory to evil if their tool prompts Yahoo!, Microsoft, or my ISP to start handing out similar software that's a little more aggressive about stuffing in the links. Lots of companies have a different definition of &quot;evil&quot; than the Google guys—leaving money on the table is the ultimate sin.</p>
<p>If for no other reason, Google should yank AutoLink because it's a poorly designed, oddly un-Googlish feature for a company that made its name on unobtrusiveness and unambiguous results. Most of all, it's unsavvy. Google's clever reinvention of <a href="http://www.google.com/ads/">Web ads</a> won instant praise from both surfers and advertisers. AutoLink makes me wince. There's got to be a better way to present map and book links than clumsily editing someone else's HTML.</p>
<p>My advice to Google: Admit that you're not a two-man startup anymore. Before you launch another AutoLink, bring in an external focus group. You can even invite a few dozen of the bloggers who are jumping all over you. Microsoft did just that before publicly launching its new search tools. Before you start laughing, maybe you should try Googling for &quot;MSN Search is evil.&quot; </p>Thu, 03 Mar 2005 22:14:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/03/when_good_search_engines_go_bad.htmlPaul Boutin2005-03-03T22:14:00ZIs Google's new AutoLink a force for evil?TechnologyIs Google's new AutoLink a force for evil?2114308Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2114308falsefalsefalseIs Google's new AutoLink a force for evil?Is Google's new AutoLink a force for evil?A Browser That Talks Backhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/03/a_browser_that_talks_back.html
<p> If phone makers get their way, pretty soon we'll all tote little Web browsers in our pockets, whipping them out 10 times a day instead of running back to a desktop screen. Sounds great, until you try to navigate <a href="http://www.mrpizzaman.com/menu.htm">Mr. Pizza Man</a>'s online menu on your cell phone's tiny screen. By the time you've thumb-typed or stylus-tapped your way through the dozens of yummy options, you could have ordered 100 pizzas the old-fashioned way. Wouldn't this all be easier if you could talk to your browser like it were the pizza guy?</p>
<p>It certainly would, based on my test drive of the <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a> browser for Windows, which comes with built-in voice support. At least in this beta version, Opera's most useful voice-activated features are the commands that control the browser itself. All I had to do was plug in my USB headset (if you've got a laptop, you can just use the built-in speaker and microphone) and turn on the voice feature in the preferences panel. Instantly, the browser obeyed my commands. &quot;Opera, back!&quot; I said, and the back button clicked. &quot;Opera, next link! Opera, open link!&quot; It all seems like a cute gimmick at first, but as I write this article I'm finding it easier to shout at Opera to scroll up and scroll down than to reach over a whole 2 inches to grab my mouse. (If you do want a cute gimmick, though, say, &quot;Opera, speak!&quot; and listen to <a href="http://www.mchawking.com/">MC Stephen Hawking</a> read angst-ridden LiveJournal entries.)</p>
<p>The browser itself is fast and consistently crash-free. Opera has been ahead of the curve on tech specs and performance since the mid-1990s, but Wired News recently dubbed it &quot;<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66394,00.html">The Forgotten Browser</a>&quot;—latecomer Firefox now gets gushing reviews for features Opera had years ago. If Opera wants to strike back by luring away headset-wearing freaks like me, it has a bit more work to do. The speech-recognition software, which comes from IBM, performed well even with the stereo cranking a couple of feet away, but there are a few missing features. You can't speak URLs into the browser yet. It would also be nice if Opera had a &quot;search&quot; command—shouting &quot;Opera, search Paul Boutin!&quot; would look for the phrase &quot;Paul Boutin&quot; using my default search engine. (For a complete list of Opera's voice commands, click <a href="http://help.opera.com/Windows/8.00/en/voice.html#voice-commands">here</a>.) </p>
<p>Speech-driven computer interfaces are nothing new—you can buy IBM's <a href="http://www-306.ibm.com/software/voice/viavoice/">ViaVoice</a> for about $45. But the Opera browser is significant because it adds support for a new markup language called <a href="http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wi-xvlanguage/">X+V</a> that takes on the annoyances of using the Web on a mobile gadget. X+V, short for XHTML plus Voice, has been jointly developed by IBM, Motorola, and Opera. The language makes it easy for Web designers to hide special tags on their sites that voice-enabled browsers can both speak—&quot;Would you like a small, medium, or large?&quot;—and listen for—&quot;Give me extra anchovies.&quot; </p>
<p>This old IBM <a href="http://www-306.ibm.com/software/pervasive/multimodal">demo video</a> shows how much easier it is to book a flight on your PDA if you can just say your flight number or destination city rather than having to type it out. (Note to IBM: In your next demo, replace Boston with Albuquerque—that'll make the speech advantage obvious.) If you've installed the Opera browser, check out IBM's <a href="http://www-306.ibm.com/software/pervasive/multimodal/demos.shtml">demo menus</a> for ordering pizza and Chinese takeout. Each menu only has a few items, so it may not be obvious why it's so great to say &quot;ginger chicken&quot; instead of just clicking the checkbox. But imagine a real Chinese menu with 100 items that's displayed on a tiny phone screen. With X+V, words with unusual spellings or pronunciations can be programmed into the page phonetically. It's elementary to have the menu ask if you want soup or rice, too.</p>
<p>IBM's demos are kind of dull, but Opera's <a href="http://my.opera.com/community/dev/voice">talking pages</a> for Web developers are a cutup. One shows how to rig a page to parse sentences so it seems like it understands the user. Tell it, &quot;I want to shut down the computer,&quot; and it replies, &quot;Why do you want to shut down the poor computer?&quot; View the page's source code, and you'll see that it just listens for any sentence that matches &quot;I want to ___ the ___&quot; and plugs those words into a canned reply. Another page shows how a site's voice could be flipped from male to female to match a customer profile.</p>
<p>It'll probably be a couple more years before X+V makes its way into corporate Web sites—the technology is still being developed, and Opera hasn't added voice support to its mobile browser yet. But the markup language itself is incredibly easy to write. I set up a talking <a href="http://www.paulboutin.com/xvdemo.html">demo page</a> myself in five minutes and am now working on making it listen to me. A pro Web programmer could add voice interaction to a page quickly, making sites like Amazon and Orbitz much easier to use from a PDA or smartphone. Finally, a breakthrough for those of us who love versatility, portability, and the sound of our own voice.</p>Tue, 01 Mar 2005 22:25:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/03/a_browser_that_talks_back.htmlPaul Boutin2005-03-01T22:25:00ZHow to chat your way around the Web.TechnologyA browser that talks back.2114194Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2114194falsefalsefalseA browser that talks back.A browser that talks back.The Typo Millionaireshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/02/the_typo_millionaires.html
<p>There's one Internet scam that's unavoidable, at least if your typing is as bad as mine. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there's been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as your mistype a URL. When I worked at <a href="http://www.hotbot.com/">HotBot</a> a decade ago, part of my job was to handle the angry, confused callers who stumbled into the parallel universes of htobot.com and hotbto.com. At a boom-era party in Silicon Valley, I met a woman who'd goosed her income by developing software that took a list of the most-visited Web sites, calculated the <a href="http://www.ezrankings.com/typo_misspellings.html">most likely typos</a> that surfers would make trying to reach them, and automatically registered those domains if they were available. She then raked it in by serving ads to the accidental tourists who landed on her sites.</p>
<p>Various studies have estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of all hand-entered URLs are <a href="http://domainsmagazine.com/managearticle.asp?c=370&amp;a=238">mistyped</a>, adding up to at least 20 million <a href="http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2003/0922backspin.html">wrong numbers</a> per day. From my own experience that sounds about right—I can spell just fine but I leave out characters, transpose them, or hit the wrong key at least 10 times a day. No wonder wave after wave of entrepreneurs have fought to tap that flow and turn it into cash. And you know what type of entrepreneur. Typo traffic supposedly generated a million bucks a year for John &quot;Cupcake Party&quot; Zuccarini, a Florida man who registered as many as 3,000 typos of popular domains. God bless American entrepreneurs, I say, but Zuccarini made the mistake of serving porn to kids who misspelled sites like cartoonnetwork.com. He was <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2003-09-03-online-porn-trapper_x.htm">arrested</a> in 2003 for &quot;us[ing] a misleading Web address to draw children to pornography.&quot;</p>
<p>I'd never suggest that steal.com exists solely to grab dyslexic <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> readers, but who are the folks at wwwslate.com kidding? Shoe shoppers who mistype <a href="http://www.zappos.com/">www.zappos.com</a> as wwwzappos.com get pictures of women who are wearing shoes but not much else. Then there are sites like <a href="http://news.com.com/2100-1023-202985.html?legacy=cnet">whitehouse.com</a>—right spelling, wrong URL. The site's owner told the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/02/10/whitehouse.com.ap/">Associated Press</a> last year that he decided to sell his famous porn site because his son was getting old enough to start asking questions. As of right now, the front page hints that &quot;Something big is coming.&quot;</p>
<p>There's another typo-squatting game that only the big guys can play. In 2001, Microsoft <a href="http://news.com.com/2100-1023-272578.html?legacy=cnet">rejiggered</a> Internet Explorer so that if you type in a URL that doesn't exist, the browser will redirect you to a Microsoft page. The current version says something like, &quot;We can't find srate.com,&quot; with a tempting search box immediately below it—a blatant ploy to drive traffic to MSN Search. When I finally found the menu in Explorer that lets me pick a different search engine for the site-not-found page, Google is conspicuously excluded—you can't even add it as a write-in. </p>
<p>Techies rage that this is Microsoft evil incarnate, but at least it's possible to <a href="http://www.google.com/options/defaults.html#default">make Google your default search engine</a>. It's much worse when a real monopoly tries to grab your traffic with a system you can't reconfigure. In 2003, VeriSign, the company in charge of .com and .net domain names, added a wildcard entry to their database that matched any domain that wasn't already registered. Any user who requested a nonexistent domain got a VeriSign page instead, and the company planned to sell links to the correct sites on this landing page. You probably don't remember the episode, because a day later the geeks who maintain the Net's domain-name server software released an <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60473,00.html">emergency upgrade</a> that neutered VeriSign's plans. </p>
<p>Like a germ that keeps mutating, there's a new typo-grabbing trick out there that's harder to kill. <a href="http://www.paxfire.com/">Paxfire</a>, a Reston, Va., startup headed by former <em>USA Today</em> tech reporter Mark Lewyn, has figured out where to put the intercept system so no one can shut it down—your ISP. If your service provider signs up with Paxfire, requests to nonexistent sites will send you to a Paxfire-powered page full of ads. Don't like it? Fine, just switch to another ISP—the market will decide! Of course, switching ISPs is more painful than having your typos redirected. My last move took so long I ended up <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2109941/">stealing Wi-Fi</a> from the neighbors for weeks. ISPs that serve Paxfire pages will lose some customers, but not most of them. It's more convenient to bellyache about those damn ads every day than to go without broadband for a week.</p>
<p>So, are we just doomed to suffer one typo traffic scam after another? Only until someone makes a software program that lets me control what to do with my typos. Here's a simple design spec. First, intercept obvious, punctuation-challenged goofs like wwwslate.com. Second, recognize when a URL isn't resolved by domain-name servers by detecting when Internet Explorer, Paxfire, or any other known culprit tries to serve a landing page. Third, keep a database of typo-trap URLs like htobot.com. And lastly, I should be able to manually configure the software to handle my habitual mistakes—whenever I type <a href="http://www.markrobinson.com/">markrobinson.com</a>, give me <a href="http://www.markrobinson.org/">markrobinson.org</a> instead. It's so obvious that I'm tempted to download the Firefox source code and take a whack at doing this myself. Too bad the only thing worse than my typing is my programming.</p>Fri, 11 Feb 2005 22:54:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/02/the_typo_millionaires.htmlPaul Boutin2005-02-11T22:54:00ZThe sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet—and how to kill it off once and for all.TechnologyHow to kill&nbsp;off the oldest scam on the Internet.2113397Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2113397falsefalsefalseHow to kill off the oldest scam on the Internet.How to kill off the oldest scam on the Internet.You Can't Be Too Thinhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/01/you_cant_be_too_thin.html
<p></p>
<p>It's a given that fat broadband lines are the future of online media. But right now, for Internet radio, the future is about slimming down—creating skinny little streams of data that don't eat up too much bandwidth. The key is a new and better audio compression format called aacPlus, or sometimes HE-AAC, which has been chosen by the industry committee that standardized <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3">MP3</a> 13 years ago (the <a href="http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/">Motion Picture Experts Group</a>). If you've tried to listen to online stations, you know they sound grainy if they're streamed at any less than 128 kilobits per second—maybe 96 kbps if you're not fussy. That makes a broadband connection a must. But aacPlus sounds nearly as good as a CD, even when it's compressed enough to play through a dialup line. Don't take my word for it—see the results of the European Broadcasting Union's <a href="http://www.ebu.ch/CMSimages/en/tec_doc_t3296_tcm6-10497.pdf">listener tests</a>, in which aacPlus was deemed the &quot;clear winner&quot; at a dialup-friendly 48 kbps.</p>
<p></p>
<p>AacPlus has been around for a while—it's what XM satellite radio has used from the outset—but recently it's been gaining ground. Future digital music players will support the format just as surely as they do MP3, but you don't have to wait—you can listen to it right now. Install the free <a href="http://www.winamp.com/">Winamp</a> player, which added aacPlus support a few months ago. Then click through the channels on the <a href="http://www.tuner2.com/">Tuner2</a> Web site, which all stream aacPlus sound at 48 kbps or less. I've spent a week comparing them to the higher bandwidth stations served by the big three of Net radio—Yahoo, AOL, and MSN—and only Yahoo's 96 kbps premium subscription channels sound as good. For a tour, skip Tuner2's glut of techno stations and instead try Groove Salad for laid-back electro-lounge music, Radio Paradise for classic rock, and Sky.FM's Mostly Classical channel. (If you're on a Mac or other non-Windows computer, install the free <a href="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/">VLC</a> player instead of Winamp.) </p>
<p></p>
<p>It seems crazy until you try it, but Mostly Classical proves that aacPlus can sound great at 24 kbps. At 48 kbps, it's almost as crisp as a CD. At 128 kbps, it can deliver 5.1 channel surround sound. AacPlus works by combining three technologies, each of which shrinks the size of an audio signal. The first is AAC, the Advanced Audio Coding technique that Apple licensed from Dolby for iTunes. AAC analyzes the sound and throws away any data it knows human ears won't be able to hear, which is a lot. Then, aacPlus adds <a href="http://www.codingtechnologies.com/products/sbr.htm">Spectral Band Replication</a>, which strips out all of the music's high frequencies and replaces them with a tiny bit of analytical data. AacPlus players reconstruct the highs as a mathematical function of what's left. As a final space-saving trick, aacPlus tracks are recorded in <a href="http://www.codingtechnologies.com/products/paraSter.htm">parametric stereo</a>. Instead of a left and a right channel, one channel is the sum of the left and right signals (L+R), and the other is their difference (L-R). This takes up less bandwidth, and the player can easily flip the two channels back to the original left and right. (Bonus trivia: This is how <a href="http://www.smoke.com.au/~ic/mpx.html">FM stereo</a> broadcasts work.)</p>
<p></p>
<p>Why bother with all this trickery when cheap broadband is spreading everywhere? There are two good reasons. For station owners, lower bandwidth means lower costs. Webcasters spend most of their money paying for network traffic. A station that serves MP3 streams to a thousand listeners at a time can run up a $4,000 monthly bill. Downsizing from 128 kbps to 24 knocks that down to around $1,000. The result: More sites will be able to afford to serve more channels to more listeners, creating a sort of anti-Clear Channel effect. To get an idea just how much variety is already out there on Net radio, spend a few minutes randomly searching <a href="http://www.shoutcast.com/">Shoutcast</a>'s 8,000-channel directory. You can hunt down obscure genres like Ghanaian hilife, listen to alternative newscasters on Radio Chomsky, and check what's playing on nine dozen '80s channels instead of one. Most of these stations broadcast in MP3 format. Imagine what'll happen when the cost of Webcasting goes down by a factor of two, three, or four as aacPlus players become the norm. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Just as important, low-bandwidth stations can reach us in places where we can't get a 128 kbps connection. Today that includes homes with dial-up lines, offices where co-workers share a DSL or T1 connection, and the not-so-speedy Wi-Fi link to my roof. But there's a huge audience looming on the horizon: cellular subscribers. Gadget makers plan to build aacPlus players into 3G phones, PDAs, laptops with cellular modems, maybe even car systems, which could one day tune in to cellular towers instead of satellites, and stream music that actually sounds good straight from the Net. Drivers get excited about 130 channels, but imagine how psyched they'll be with 13,000. Soon, I'll be able to listen to Groove Salad without being stuck at my desk.</p>Sat, 22 Jan 2005 00:44:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2005/01/you_cant_be_too_thin.htmlPaul Boutin2005-01-22T00:44:00ZThe skinny new audio format that will replace MP3s—and revolutionize Internet radio.TechnologyA skinny new audio format.2112548Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2112548falsefalsefalseA skinny new audio format.A skinny new audio format.Keeper Findershttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/12/keeper_finders.html
<p>I can find anything online in under a minute, but it takes me days to find an e-mail address on my PC. Lucky for me, the leading Web search companies are falling all over themselves to create free programs that dig through your hard drive. Google, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, and MSN&nbsp;have all released desktop search programs in the past few months. (<strong><em>Slate</em></strong> and MSN are both owned by Microsoft.) AOL's application, which is based on software from a company called Copernic, is now in customer trials, and Yahoo will join the fray early in 2005.</p>
<p>Desktop search applications work a lot like the search function that's already built into the Windows Start Menu, but they're much quicker. They're also smarter about sifting through your e-mail, music files, browser history, and other special data formats. You probably won't find all the Steely Dan songs in your iTunes library or every PDF with the phrase &quot;owner's manual&quot; using the Windows search. If you use the right desktop search application, it's a snap.</p>
<p>How's it possible to make searching through files on your desktop as painless as finding results on the Web? Memorize the contents of the hard drive in advance. In simplest terms, a desktop search program works by pre-scanning files on your computer—e-mail messages, Web pages in your browser's cache, spreadsheets, etc.—and compiling a list of the words and phrases it finds. (Depending on the program, the initial indexing process can sideline your computer for anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of hours.) This index of your hard disk's contents gets stored as a compact file or folder that's optimized for fast access. When you punch in a term like &quot;invoice,&quot; you'll get results in a fraction of a second because the program already knows every file to look in.</p>
<p>Since running more than one of these programs at once will slow your computer to a crawl, I installed each of the five applications separately and then went hunting for representative data: e-mail messages and attachments, phone numbers, instant messages, PowerPoint presentations, MP3s, photos, PDF and PostScript files, Web pages, and Word and Quark files. Speed and accuracy weren't an issue for any of these programs even on a minimally equipped PC, so I evaluated each program based on the following criteria: </p>
<p><strong>Interface: </strong>Is it a stand-alone application, a browser-based tool, or does it just add search bars to your screen? Since different users prefer different approaches, what matters most is how well the chosen interface works.</p>
<p><strong>What can it search?</strong> Every program I tested does full-text searches of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files and e-mail. Most of them search music, image, and video files, as well as Web bookmarks. But if you want to look through e-mail attachments, instant messages, your browser history, and non-Microsoft-Office files—or if you use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer—the field narrows quickly. </p>
<p><strong>Best feature(s): </strong>What distinguishes the program from the rest of the pack?</p>
<p><strong>Worst feature(s):</strong> What's the most frustrating thing about the program?</p>
<p>The results, from worst to best:</p>
<p><strong>Ask Jeeves</strong></p>
<p><strong> Interface:</strong> A stand-alone application with a simple layout that doesn't flicker or reshuffle. Compared to its competitors, Jeeves is easy to understand and relaxing to use.</p>
<p><strong>What can it search? </strong>Not enough. Jeeves does full-text searches of Microsoft Office files, Outlook messages, and multimedia files but doesn't search browser cache, instant messages, Outlook Express e-mail, or Outlook mail attachments. Even worse, it doesn't let you work around its limitations by adding new file types or folders manually. Jeeves also thumbs its nose at customization, limiting users to two indexing options: You can scan either the My Documents and Desktop folders or the entire disk, nothing in between. </p>
<p><strong>Best features: </strong>Listing search results in <a href="http://sp.ask.com/docs/desktop/">tabbed categories</a> like &quot;Pictures,&quot; &quot;Office Documents,&quot; and &quot;Internet Bookmarks&quot; makes it easy to eyeball what kind of files you've found. A preview pane also shows you the first few lines from Word files and a few other types, so you needn't waste time opening them.</p>
<p><strong>Worst feature: </strong>Can't add new file types.</p>
<p><strong>Grade: D.</strong> Although it's easy to use, Ask Jeeves won't let you search as many files as the competition. The best thing I can say about Jeeves is that adding file types is easier than what they've already accomplished—building a great user interface. Jeeves will become a front-runner if it adds more data types in the near future, but for now it misses too much stuff you'll want to search.</p>
<p><strong>HotBot</strong></p>
<p><strong> Interface:</strong> An Internet Explorer add-in along the lines of the Google toolbar. When you type in a search term, the results are displayed in a <a href="http://www.hotbot.com/tools/desktop/">sidebar</a> that slides in from the left edge of the browser.</p>
<p><strong>What does it search? </strong>HotBot won't index<strong></strong>image, music, and movie files or<strong></strong>e-mail attachments. On the plus side, it does full-text searches of PDF files, RSS feeds, and the Internet Explorer history and joins MSN as the only program to index Outlook calendar entries, events, and notes. HotBot also lets you add oddball and custom file types—pretty much anything other than .JPG, .GIF, .MP3, or .MOV. You can also specify which folders on your disk to index or to ignore.</p>
<p><strong>Best feature: </strong>You can choose separate indexing schedules for e-mail, RSS feeds, Web history, and anything else to minimize the amount of time HotBot spends crawling over your hard disk.</p>
<p><strong>Worst feature: </strong>Too many important files—e-mail attachments, pictures, movies, music—aren't searchable, even by file name.</p>
<p><strong>Grade: C.</strong> The HotBot Desktop is the only entry other than Copernic that doesn't call itself an unfinished &quot;beta&quot; release, but it still feels like a work in progress. It gets a low grade because it doesn't index attachments or music files and is full of little annoyances like a restriction on scheduling the e-mail index to update more than once an hour. HotBot developers say these restrictions were necessary to minimize the program's processor and disk space usage. I would have preferred to make those decisions myself.</p>
<p><strong>Google</strong></p>
<p><strong> Interface:</strong> Browser-based search and results pages that look like the Google Web site you know and love.</p>
<p><strong>What can it search? </strong>Google can index your AOL Instant Messenger sessions as you type, so you can search them later without having to save each one to a file manually. It also reads your browser cache (if you use Internet Explorer), Outlook attachments, and Outlook Express e-mail. It won't search Outlook Express attachments or contacts, PDF file contents, or, surprisingly, your Gmail account. </p>
<p><strong>Best features: </strong>Desktop search results can be included <a href="http://desktop.google.com/images/google_results.gif">at the top</a> of Google Web searches just like headlines from Google News. Browser history results include Web page <a href="http://desktop.google.com/images/results.gif">thumbnails</a>. Privacy lovers can exclude specific folders and remove individual results from the index. And unlike the competition, store and search Web history pages from the secure servers used for online banking and e-commerce transactions. </p>
<p><strong>Worst features: </strong>There's no way to manually add folders to be indexed. It appears that Google restricts searches to your personal folders.</p>
<p><strong>Grade: C+. </strong>Google's desktop program has been plagued by questions about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/technology/20flaw.html">security problems</a> that could let remote hackers search your PC. But the real problem here is that <em>you</em> can't search your entire PC. The program not only restricts searches to a preset list of folders, but it also won't match partial filenames. Google's desktop search is perhaps the least geek-friendly of the bunch, save Ask Jeeves. It doesn't have any of the special <a href="http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html">search syntax</a> (&quot;paul NOT boutin&quot;) or smart results sorting that Google's Web search is known for. If your photos have names like paul001.jpg, paul023.jpg, searching for &quot;paul&quot; or &quot;paul*&quot; won't turn up anything. If you don't know a wayward file's exact name, or if it's hiding in some backwater of your disk, you're simply out of luck.</p>
<p><strong>MSN</strong></p>
<p><strong> Interface:</strong> Adds search boxes to the Windows taskbar, Internet Explorer, and Outlook. Searches from the taskbar pop up a special window; searches from IE and Outlook show up inside the application window.</p>
<p><strong>What can it search? </strong>Outlook calendar, events, and notes, Microsoft <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/prodinfo/default.mspx">OneNote</a> files, MSN chats, and Hotmail accounts (via Outlook Express). Oddly, it won't search your Internet Explorer history.</p>
<p><strong>Best features: </strong>The <a href="http://toolbar.msn.com/tour_suite/pc.aspx">taskbar search box</a> shows results while you're still typing, with impressive speed. Command-line fans can use advanced <a href="http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/toolbar.aspx?t=MSNTbar_PROC_CompleteSearchSyntax.htm">query syntax</a> such as &quot;author:Josh OR author:Mark&quot; to refine searches.</p>
<p><strong>Worst feature: </strong>MSN doesn't let you add new file types like PostScript or Quark files.</p>
<p><strong>Grade: B. </strong>If Outlook is your life, this is your search tool. While the number and variety of windows almost sent me crying for Ask Jeeves, MSN's search finds much more data than most everyone else. The multiple search bars and results screens it adds to your desktop and applications can be annoying, but it's not that hard to turn off the ones you don't like. MSN would probably get an A if it searched more stuff.</p>
<p><strong>Copernic</strong></p>
<p><strong> Interface:</strong> A standalone application that also adds a search box to the Windows taskbar. It looks similar to Ask Jeeves but doesn't have the handy tabbed results summary at the top of the screen, nor will it let you search every data type at once. The preview pane displays a wide range of file types and will automatically scroll to and highlight the location of your search terms within a file or message.</p>
<p><strong>What can it search? </strong>Any file type you add using its Advanced Options settings, in any folder you want. It's also the only program that will search Firefox browser histories and bookmarks, not just Internet Explorer. </p>
<p><strong>Best features:</strong> You can add extra file types and folders to the index without any of the other programs' restrictions. The search box supports Boolean phrases (&quot;Slate NOT Webhead&quot;), and its graphical interface has options to refine results, such as e-mail headers (&quot;From: Josh, Subject: deadline&quot;) or date ranges (&quot;from July 29 to November 2, 2004&quot;). Much of the index can be updated in real time as files are changed and new messages arrive, rather than at scheduled intervals. </p>
<p><strong>Worst feature: </strong>You have to click through each category of results (&quot;Emails,&quot; &quot;Bookmarks,&quot; &quot;History&quot;) separately, rather than being able to see all of them at once. If it only listed the number of results for each category, like Ask Jeeves and Google, you'd instantly know which categories to bother clicking on.</p>
<p><strong>Grade: A.</strong> Copernic has almost as many configuration options as the rest put together but lacks some of the best features of the lesser tools: Jeeves' all-categories-at-once search and tabbed results, Google's live AIM indexing and Web page thumbnails, MSN's advanced search syntax and index of Outlook info, and HotBot's RSS search. Still, Copernic finds more than any other desktop search and gives you control over how it indexes your computer. <em>Search Engine Watch</em> has <a href="http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041210-164231">confirmed</a> that AOL's still-under-wraps desktop search is &quot;powered by Copernic,&quot; but you can download Copernic for free right now without joining AOL. At the price, it's one heck of a deal.</p>Fri, 31 Dec 2004 18:33:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/12/keeper_finders.htmlPaul Boutin2004-12-31T18:33:00ZFive new programs that let you search your hard drive without having a seizure.TechnologySearch your hard drive without having a seizure.2111643Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2111643falsefalsefalseSearch your hard drive without having a seizure.Search your hard drive without having a seizure.Click on image to expandHow To Steal Wi-Fihttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/11/how_to_steal_wifi.html
<p> When I moved into a new neighborhood last week, I expected the usual hassles. Then I found out I'd have to wait more than a month for a DSL line. I started convulsing. If I don't have Net access for even one day, I can't do my job. So, what was I supposed to do? There's an Internet caf&eacute; on the next block, but they close early. I had no choice—it was time to start sneaking on to my neighbors' home networks.</p>
<p>Every techie I know says that you shouldn't use other people's networks without permission. Every techie I know does it anyway. If you're going to steal—no, let's say <em>borrow</em>—your neighbor's Wi-Fi access, you might as well do it right. Step one: Lose the guilt. The FCC told me that they don't know of any federal or state laws that make it illegal to log on to an open network. Using someone's connection to check your e-mail isn't like hacking into their bank account. It's more like you're borrowing a cup of sugar. (Unless you hog their bandwidth by watching lots of streaming video—that's like hijacking a sugar truck.)</p>
<p>In the end, it's your neighbor's Internet service provider—not your neighbor—who will pay for the added traffic, and the ISP has already factored a small amount of line-sharing into their price plan. It is true that your surfing could cause the folks next door to break their service contract—many broadband providers do specifically forbid home customers from sharing a connection. But let's deal with those abstract ethical issues later—you have important mail to answer!</p>
<p>If you want to find a Wi-Fi network, <em>don't</em> start by looking on the sidewalk for chalk marks. &quot;<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,748499,00.html">Warchalking</a>,&quot; a technique for writing symbols in public places to alert neighbors to nearby wireless access points, is a cool concept that's been undermined by the fact that <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,53638,00.html">no one has ever used it</a>. The best method to find some free wireless is to treat your laptop like a cell phone. Since Wi-Fi and cell phone signals travel on a similar radio frequency, the same tricks you use for getting a better phone connection might work on your computer. Sit near a window, since Wi-Fi signals travel better through glass than through solid walls. Stay away from metal objects. Pay close attention to your laptop's orientation—rotating your machine just a few degrees could help you pick up a network that you couldn't see before. Raise your laptop over your head, put it flat on the floor, tilt it sideways while leaning halfway out the window—get out the divining rod if you have to. You might get a reputation for being some sick laptop yoga freak, but isn't free Internet worth it?</p>
<p>If you live downtown or in a suburb where the houses are close together, a few minutes of laptop gymnastics will probably reveal several Wi-Fi networks. Certain names are a giveaway that a network probably won't be password-protected. Look for &quot;linksys,&quot; &quot;default,&quot; &quot;Wireless,&quot; &quot;NETGEAR,&quot; &quot;belkin54g,&quot; and &quot;Apple Network 0273df.&quot; These are the default network names for the most popular wireless routers. If a network owner hasn't taken the time to change the default name, that's a good clue that they probably won't have a password either. You should also look for signs of hacker culture. Since hackers love giving away Net access, an all-lowercase name like &quot;hackdojo&quot; is most likely an invitation to log on. On the other hand, a name in all caps is typically a network under corporate lockdown.</p>
<p>If you do get prompted for a password, try &quot;public&quot;—that's the default on many of Apple's AirPort units. You can also try common passwords like &quot;admin,&quot; &quot;password,&quot; and &quot;1234&quot;—or just check out this <a href="http://www.phenoelit.de/dpl/dpl.html">exhaustive list</a> of default passwords. You should also try using the name of the network in the password space. A generic password could mean that the network's owner didn't have the sense to pick something less obvious or that they've decided to welcome outsiders. But who cares? You're in. And again, there's no specific law barring you from guessing the password, as long as you don't crack an encrypted network and read other people's transmissions. </p>
<p>You can tell that you've successfully joined a wireless network when your laptop's IP address changes as it's assigned a local number by the network's router. To watch it happen on a PC, keep the Network control panel in Windows open; if you have an Apple notebook, look at the Network section of the System Preferences program. (And if you're running Linux, I don't need to tell you where to look.) Once your laptop has an IP address, your next hurdle is getting DNS to work. DNS stands for Domain Name Service—it's what translates Internet domains like &quot;slate.com&quot; into IP addresses like 207.46.141.216. On most networks, DNS works automatically. But if you get a browser error like &quot;Cannot find server,&quot; go back to your network menus and configure your laptop to use a <a href="http://www.opennic.unrated.net/public_servers.html">public name server</a>—144.162.120.230 in Dallas, for instance.</p>
<p>Once DNS is working, you should be good to go. While you should be able to surf the Web with no problems, you may have trouble sending mail from Outlook or other desktop programs because of restrictions on e-mail routing that have been set up to stop spammers. If you have problems, just use a Web-based mail service like <a href="http://www.hotmail.com/">Hotmail</a> or <a href="http://www.gmail.com/">Gmail</a> instead.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that the neighbors may not be thrilled that you're sharing the line. One guy next door to my new building shut off his network the day after I moved in, probably because he got spooked by all those blinking LEDs on his router. Even neighbors who are happy to share may see you in a different light if they check their router's URL logs and find a few hundred hits on porn sites. While your browsing will show up under an anonymous address, the short range of Wi-Fi means that they'll at least be able to figure out that one of the laptop owners within 100 feet of their living room is a stuffed animal fetishist.&nbsp;(As a San Franciscan, I need to point out that a stuffed animal fetish is perfectly normal. It's your neighbors who have the problem.)</p>
<p>Since everyone isn't as eager to share their network as I am, it's only fair to explain that there's an incredibly easy way to keep neighbors and drive-by geeks off your network. All you have to do is set a password that isn't as obvious as &quot;1234.&quot; There's an eye-glazing list of Wi-Fi <a href="http://compnetworking.about.com/od/wirelesssecurity/tp/wifisecurity.htm">security measures</a> you can implement to block overachieving Russian teens from monitoring your keystrokes, but in real life the only people sniffing your wireless signal are jerks like me who need a place to log on until the phone company wires the apartment. An unguessable password sends as clear a message as a shot of Mace: Go find a Starbucks, creep.</p>
<p><em><p><strong>Clarification, Nov. 22, 2004</strong>: There are some laws that could be used to charge you with unauthorized computer use, but my legal sources say that because there are so many networks left open to the public on purpose, it would be tough for an individual to make the legal case that their intent was to keep everyone off their network if it's not password-protected. If you stick to surfing the Web and not other people's PCs, you'll probably be safe from prosecution.</p></em></p>Thu, 18 Nov 2004 22:16:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/11/how_to_steal_wifi.htmlPaul Boutin2004-11-18T22:16:00ZAnd how to keep the neighbors from stealing yours.TechnologyHow to steal Wi-Fi.2109941Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2109941falsefalsefalseHow to steal Wi-Fi.How to steal Wi-Fi.Nullsoft, 1997-2004http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/11/nullsoft_19972004.html
<p> When America Online <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/aol_axes_nullsoft/">purged its tiny Nullsoft branch</a> of all but three employees this week, it lost arguably the most prolific division of the company.&nbsp;Not that you could really blame AOL for the mass layoffs—all of Nullsoft's projects were spitballs tossed at the honchos upstairs. Before the AOL days, Nullsoft founder Justin Frankel and his team of whiz kids practically invented the MP3 craze when they rolled out their Winamp player and Shoutcast server. When AOL paid millions to buy the then-20-year-old Frankel's services in 1999, he used his new gig to become what <em>Rolling Stone</em> called &quot;the Net's No. 1 punk.&quot;</p>
<p>From his AOL office, Frankel posted applications (without his corporate parent's permission) that made screwing the Recording Industry Association of America easier than ever, including the peer-to-peer program Gnutella and the covert file-sharing system WASTE. Frankel quit at the&nbsp;beginning of this year, and Nullsoft's shutdown nails the coffin lid shut. There'll be no more cool pirate tools underwritten by America Online.</p>
<p>What kind of snot-nosed brat takes millions from AOL and then publishes software perfect for ripping off Time Warner's entire catalog? Frankel, a grunge-dressing slacker from Sedona, Ariz., was a teenage college dropout in 1997 when he wrote <a href="http://www.winamp.com/">Winamp</a>, the first program that made playing MP3s on a PC point-and-click simple. He's not the world's greatest programmer, but Frankel has a knack for finding simple and clever solutions to huge engineering problems. While he's got a prankster's streak—one of his high-school hacks was a keystroke logger for the teachers' computers—Frankel didn't write Winamp so he could steal music. All he wanted was a better way to listen to music on his PC. Apparently, so did several million other people.</p>
<p>As the shareware checks for Winamp piled up, Frankel kept hacking. While big software companies elephant-walked in circles trying to develop online music distribution systems, he created <a href="http://www.shoutcast.com/">Shoutcast</a>, an MP3 server that streams music over the Net. Winamp and Shoutcast became the default way to play, drawing tens of millions of fans in less than two years. That's when AOL rewarded Frankel by buying Nullsoft for $100 million in 1999.</p>
<p>Lots of geeks who couldn't make it through engineering school became multimillionaires in the boom. But Frankel remained an unreconstructed kid in a field of hackers-turned-entrepreneurs. Like Kurt Cobain, he used his money to challenge the people who gave it to him. As AOL was merging with Time Warner in March 2000, Frankel published <a href="http://www.gnutelliums.com/">Gnutella</a>, a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that addressed the fatal flaw in Shawn Fanning's Napster. Fanning relied on a bank of central servers that would eventually be shut down by record industry lawyers. Gnutella, by contrast, was completely decentralized. The only way to shut it down would be to go after every single user.</p>
<p>When Frankel posted Gnutella on Nullsoft's site it came with a cheeky, half-apologetic note: &quot;See? AOL can bring you good things!&quot; AOL was not amused; they had him remove the program immediately and disclaimed it as an unauthorized side project. But Gnutella had already been spread around the Net and reverse-engineered by eager programmers who set to work improving Frankel's gift. Years after Napster's servers went dark, Gnutella traffic is still growing.</p>
<p>For most people, flipping off the man once would be enough, but Frankel kept at it for years—he even posted a tool that removed the ads from AOL Instant Messenger. Finally, in mid-2003, as the RIAA was preparing lawsuits against random Gnutella users, Frankel concocted a counterstrike: <a href="http://slackerbitch.free.fr/waste/download.html">WASTE</a>, a private file-sharing system whose traffic is encrypted from prying eyes and whose networks are invitation only. (The name comes from the underground postal system in Thomas Pynchon's <em>The Crying of Lot 49</em>.) If snoops can't see what WASTE users are sharing and RIAA stoolies can't hop onto the network to lure copyright violators, there's no way to gather evidence of copyright infringement short of raiding homes and seizing computers.</p>
<p>Frankel <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/5938320">told</a><em>Rolling Stone</em> that he tried to persuade AOL to release WASTE themselves as a way to revive their fast-falling customer base. When they rebuffed him, he released the program on the fourth anniversary of AOL's acquisition of Nullsoft—May 28, 2003—as a means of confronting the company. Again, AOL took the program down and disowned it. Not long after spilling his guts to <em>Rolling Stone, </em>Frankel resigned. &quot;For me, coding is a form of self-expression,&quot; he explained in a blog post that he would later remove. &quot;The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave.&quot; </p>
<p>With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects <a href="http://www.jesusonic.com/">computer</a> for his electric guitar, the old Winamp/Gnutella gang probably won't get back together for one more hit. Conventional wisdom says Frankel is more likely to join the millionaire has-beens who dot the hills in my San Francisco neighborhood or become a trophy hire at a tech startup, like contemporaries Fanning, Marc Andreessen, and Linus Torvalds.</p>
<p>But I wouldn't count him out yet. Most dot-com heroes come across as self-promoting one-hit wonders, but Frankel does his best work when you try to shut him up. It's happening again: In August, federal agents <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/25/doj_goes_after_filetraders/">raided</a> five homes and an ISP where they had managed to track down WASTE-like private networks. Having successively hacked his way around the limitations of CDs, MP3s, Napster, and the RIAA, Frankel may next try to find a way to thwart the FBI. As he's proven over and over, he doesn't need AOL's backing to do it.</p>Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:04:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/11/nullsoft_19972004.htmlPaul Boutin2004-11-12T23:04:00ZAOL kills off the last maverick tech company.TechnologyThe death of the last maverick tech company.2109615Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2109615falsefalsefalseThe death of the last maverick tech company.The death of the last maverick tech company.Nowhere To Runhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/10/nowhere_to_run.html
<p> Personal computers are powerful enough to run any program we could possibly want. So, why is there still so much software that won't run on everybody's desktop? When my friends got obsessed with the game Far Cry, I couldn't join the fun because there was no Mac version. Now that I've cracked and bought a PC, I can't use <a href="http://fire.sourceforge.net/">Fire</a>, my favorite all-in-one instant messenger.</p>
<p>The reason that software is Balkanized is that most applications are coded in some version of <a href="http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/C.html">C</a>, a programming language invented when PCs were still a dream. C programs link to your computer's software libraries so they can interact with the outside world by accepting keyboard input, drawing output on the screen, or getting online. Because the software libraries on PCs, Macs, and Unix machines vary significantly, a program written for one kind of operating system typically won't work on any other OS. To get a program written for the PC to run on a Mac, a programmer—or some small army of programmers—has to make major changes to the source code to adjust for those differences in software libraries. Want a Linux version? One for Pocket PC? You've gotta repeat the process for each one. </p>
<p>One way to bridge the gap is to use an emulator like <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/virtualpc.aspx?pid=virtualpc">Virtual PC</a>, the program that allows Mac users to run Windows programs on their machines. (An app called <a href="http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html">PearPC</a> promises to run Mac programs on PCs, but it's still in development.) But since Virtual PC works by basically running a complete copy of Windows on top of the Mac OS, performance can be slow and buggy. I got Windows Media Player to run just fine on Virtual PC, but when I plugged in a USB cable to route the music to my office stereo, the program freaked out, leaving David Byrne stuck in a stuttering loop. A more ambitious emulator called <a href="http://www.transitive.com/products.htm">QuickTransit</a> promises to let any software run on any hardware by using a set of &quot;translation modules&quot; to convert programs to other formats. But so far, the program only converts between different versions of Unix and Linux—the company told me that implementing Windows and Mac translations will take a while longer.</p>
<p>The quest for the perfect emulator is particularly frustrating because 10 years ago it seemed like we wouldn't ever need emulators. Nothing was hotter in the mid-'90s than <a href="http://www.java.com/en/index.jsp">Java</a>, a new programming language designed by Sun Microsystems with the slogan &quot;write once, run anywhere.&quot; Java had the unique property that any program written in the language could run on any computer or digital gadget with a built-in Java engine. If someone wrote a video conferencing program in Java, you could download it to your PC and your wristwatch! Your refrigerator! Your Newton! Even if Java wasn't the ideal language for every application, the run-anywhere idea evangelized by Sun's Bill Joy seemed inevitable. Programs written specifically for one operating system were so 1985.</p>
<p>I e-mailed Joy recently to ask what happened to Java and run-anywhere software, and he replied with one word: &quot;Microsoft.&quot; (Microsoft is <em><strong>Slate</strong></em>'s corporate parent.) As the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href="http://www.breakingwindows.net/1link3.htm">reported back in 1999</a>, Bill Gates sided with Microsoft &quot;hawks&quot; who supported a vigorous defense of the Windows operating system against the inroads of OS-independent software. In a presentation called &quot;Java Is Our Destiny,&quot; one Microsoft dove suggested that Microsoft make &quot;a graceful exit&quot; from Windows. According to the <em>Journal</em>, Gates reportedly suggested that he &quot;join the Peace Corps.&quot;</p>
<p>It's easy to cast Gates as Darth Vader, but at that point he was right. Java was in its infancy and would take years to reach the maturity of C's successor, C++. Programmers still mock Sun's &quot;write once, run anywhere&quot; credo as &quot;write once, debug everywhere.&quot; And back in 1995, &quot;run anywhere&quot; meant &quot;run on desktop computers,&quot; a medium that Microsoft had already conquered. There already was software that ran everywhere. It was called Windows.</p>
<p>With the Java buzz old news, it's no surprise that hot new PC programs like Skype and <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2103152/">Firefox</a> are still written in older languages like C++. But Java's finally close to being a run-anywhere technology, and right when we're really starting to need it. In the past few years, our consumer gadgets have gotten smaller and more wired together—we use our Treo to talk to our Dell and our laptop to program our TiVo. But even with all that interconnectedness, I still have to use different e-mail programs on my Mac, PC, and Blackberry. It's the height of stupidity.</p>
<p>That's where Java comes in. Portable widgets like cell phones, iPods, and that GPS unit in the car are just the right size for the tiny Java engine. More than 350 million cell phones already have Java built in, allowing software makers to sell the same downloadable games, instant messaging clients, and other software to any brand of phone. By contrast, there are only about 1 percent as many Windows-powered phones, and the pint-sized Windows CE operating system they run is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CE">completely different</a> from the bulky Windows XP on your desktop. Programs built for one don't work on the other.</p>
<p>I can't imagine that a generation from now, people will still tolerate incompatible breeds of digital devices, any more than we'd accept a Sprint phone that couldn't take calls from an AT&amp;T phone. Java, or another run-anywhere programming language (even Microsoft has one, C#), will most likely become the lingua franca of the world's gadgets. Once that happens, PCs will have to follow. My hope is that, in another decade, when I find a cool new piece of software, I'll be able to run it anywhere I want.</p>Tue, 19 Oct 2004 20:11:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/10/nowhere_to_run.htmlPaul Boutin2004-10-19T20:11:00ZWhy Mac programs don't work on your PC, and why they will soon.TechnologySoftware that works everywhere. Finally.2108399Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2108399falsefalsefalseSoftware that works everywhere. Finally.Software that works everywhere. Finally.Blue Screen of Deathhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/09/blue_screen_of_death.html
<p> There's nothing like an untimely computer crash to ruin your day—or at least ruin your reputation for keeping cool on a deadline. Crashes can range from moderately frustrating application shutdowns and &quot;not responding&quot; pop-ups to the fearsome <a href="http://www.daimyo.org/bsod/">Blue Screen of Death</a>, which brings your entire PC to a complete halt. Even my supposedly robust Mac isn't immune to this sort of fatal system failure. My machine has seized up at least once a week for the past two years, covering the screen with a <a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum=106227">transparent panel</a> that says &quot;You need to restart your computer&quot; in four languages.</p>
<p>So, why does your computer go on the fritz? More important, is there any way you can stop it from happening?</p>
<p>If one application is always shutting down, you're probably in luck. If you have a PC, search Microsoft's <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;en-us;KBHOWTO">knowledge base</a> for articles about &quot;illegal operation&quot; problems associated with the application. For a Mac, go to Apple's <a href="http://www.apple.com/support/">support page</a> and search for &quot;unexpectedly quits.&quot; If that fails, type the error messages you see into Google (e.g. &quot;The application Microsoft Word has unexpectedly quit&quot;) to find message board posts about the problem.</p>
<p>The death screen isn't as easy to figure out. In fact, there's often no way for anyone except a technician packing professional-grade diagnostic tools to find the culprit. A bug in one program can corrupt data in the computer's memory, causing an entirely different program to crash later. Bad hardware will also often lead to software errors; when the hardware doesn't send back data as expected, programs will start to fail. &quot;A broad range of conditions can cause a Fatal Exception error,&quot; shrugs Microsoft's help <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/learning/books/troubleshooting/windows/ls/122001.asp">documentation</a>. &quot;As a result, troubleshooting a Fatal Exception error can be difficult.&quot;</p>
<p>You probably won't be able to figure out what's wrong with your computer by reading the gibberish on the Blue Screen of Death, but you can make an educated guess. A few years ago, Microsoft set up the <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/maintain/WERHelp.mspx">Windows Error Reporting Service</a> to help find out where crashes come from. After a Windows application—or your whole PC—shuts down, a <a href="https://winqual.microsoft.com/help/library/images/crash_dialog.jpg">box pops up</a> asking you to send a confidential error report. Using pattern-matching software to sift through the data from millions of these reports, Microsoft discovered a surprising statistic. Seventy percent of Windows crashes involve one particular kind of software: device drivers. (I couldn't get stats for the Mac, but, at least anecdotally, device drivers are a <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2003/08/microtechs_crashtacular_zio_driver">major cause</a> of drop-dead crashes.)</p>
<p> <a href="http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/d/driver.html">Device drivers</a> handle communication between the PC's core operating system (the kernel) and hardware devices like the hard disk and the printer. When you send a file to be printed, for instance, a device driver custom-coded for your specific model asks the printer if it's good to go and translates any responses—such as an out-of-paper alert—into a format that Windows understands. (<a href="http://www.pcanswers.co.uk/tutorials/default.asp?pagetypeid=2&amp;articleid=29381&amp;subsectionid=607">Click here</a> for a more technical explanation of how drivers work.) Because device drivers tie hardware and software together, they have special privileges that your browser and word processor don't. If a device driver gets an error message it's not sure how to deal with, it can call a &quot;bug check&quot;—the big blue screen—as a way to halt everything before your data gets scrambled. Conversely, the Windows kernel can pull the trigger if a device driver's not responding properly.</p>
<p>But luckily, if you've got a device driver problem, there are probably lots of other people whose computers are crashing due to the same error. In fact, the hardware manufacturer might have published an improved version of the driver that can fix the problem.</p>
<p>If your PC is outfitted with a brand-name printer, scanner, or CD burner, its device drivers will likely have passed the exhaustive (and expensive) tests that allow bug fixes to be distributed via <a href="http://www.windowsupdate.com/">Windows Update</a>. Go to the Windows Update site, click on Custom Install, and look at the optional hardware updates on the left side of the screen—that's where you'll typically find updated device drivers. Unfortunately, even if you've set Windows Update to run automatically, you'll still have to go get new drivers manually. If you've got a Mac, Apple's <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/softwareupdates.html">Software Update</a> service automatically installs updated drivers for Apple hardware on computers running OS X. </p>
<p>If you've got a PC with hardware that doesn't meet the Windows gold standard or a Mac with a peripheral that's not made by Apple, you'll have to do some hunting. As a case study, I have a 5-year-old PC that crashed midsong every time I tried to play MP3s with RealPlayer. After years of fuming about Real's buggy software, I finally realized I might be having a device driver problem. What could be prone to glitching when playing music—maybe the sound card? Come to think of it, I hadn't seen an update for the card's device driver in two years of using Windows Update. I went to My Computer, then System Properties, and then found the model of the card by clicking on the Hardware tab. After Googling for the brand name and &quot;driver,&quot; I found a free, updated device driver on the manufacturer's Web site. Sure enough, problem solved.</p>
<p>The same approach solved my Mac crashes. My add-on Wi-Fi card doesn't use Apple's built-in device drivers; instead, I had downloaded a free one written by a generous programmer. Since this freeware driver hadn't been exhaustively tested by a big corporate lab, it wasn't shocking that it occasionally acted buggy. By searching message boards, I found a different driver that hasn't invoked the crash screen yet. (If you're looking for drivers for non-Apple hardware or older versions of the Mac OS, always try the <a href="http://discussions.info.apple.com/">Apple Discussions</a> site before roaming the Web.)</p>
<p>I got a little lucky in both these cases, but the odds were on my side. Likewise, if your computer is crashing regularly, you won't do any harm by looking for new device drivers. (One exception: Don't mess with video drivers unless you know what you're doing—you could end up with an unusable computer.) Always be sure to save a copy of your current driver before installing a new one (<a href="http://www.ehow.com/how_13835_update-any-device.html">click here</a> for instructions). If your new driver causes more problems than it cures, Windows XP has a Control Panel option to <a href="http://www.theeldergeek.com/roll_back_to_previous_driver.htm">roll back</a> to the previous version, or you can swap it back manually on older versions of Windows. You can always just cross your fingers, search the Web, and try again.</p>
<p><em>Webhead thanks Gabriel Aul, group program manager of Microsoft's Feedback&nbsp;and Supportability Platform Tea</em><em>m, and Anuj Nayar, Mac OS X PR manager for Apple.</em></p>Thu, 30 Sep 2004 12:22:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/09/blue_screen_of_death.htmlPaul Boutin2004-09-30T12:22:00ZWhy your computer still crashes.TechnologyWhy your computer still crashes.2107471Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2107471falsefalsefalseWhy your computer still crashes.Why your computer still crashes.Barbed Wirelesshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/09/barbed_wireless.html
<p> The Philadelphia city government recently announced that it will launch a <a href="http://www.phila.gov/wireless/">citywide wireless network</a> by the spring of 2006. The plan is to mount up to 16 Wi-Fi routers per square mile on streetlights in order to provide &quot;some level of free wireless Internet access to everyone living, working or visiting the city.&quot; Boston and Madison, Wis. are also considering citywide Wi-Fi that's free, or at least cheaper than DSL. You might think this means that wireless will be free everywhere in a few years. You'd be wrong.</p>
<p>Bathing a city in wireless isn't easy. Wi-Fi, which was designed for use in small home and office networks, is only one approach to routing the Net over a wireless signal. With an operating range of at best 300 feet, Wi-Fi wasn't designed for large-scale deployment. That's why you have to install one or more routers on every block to provide universal coverage. Even then, the signal will still be spotty indoors—the range is more like 30 feet if there's a wall in the way—and the whole thing will be a nightmare to implement in rural areas. </p>
<p>But right when Philly's network is scheduled for completion, there will be a successor to Wi-Fi that <em>is</em> designed to provide large-scale coverage. This new technology, dubbed <a href="http://www.wimaxforum.org/about/faq/">WiMAX</a>, will be standard in Intel's laptop chip sets starting in 2006 and will dwarf the power of Wi-Fi gear. Wi-Fi base stations transmit at about two-tenths of a watt; WiMax runs at as much as 30 watts, powering through walls with a maximum range of 30 miles. Moreover, Wi-Fi signals not only compete with each other, but with cordless phones and microwave ovens that broadcast on similar wavelengths; WiMAX travels on radio frequencies that are much less congested. A single WiMAX tower—a huge, multi-thousand-dollar contraption that resembles a cell phone tower more than an Apple AirPort—will serve thousands of customers at once.</p>
<p>That'll give us free Internet access everywhere, right? Nope. WiMAX won't be free for the same reason cell phone service isn't free. The high-powered, long-range WiMAX signal is reserved for big wireless carriers like Nextel, Sprint, and BellSouth that have bought exclusive FCC licenses. These mega-corporations paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the rights to certain radio frequencies. They'll be looking to make that money back and then some. </p>
<p>Local groups and philanthropists looking to serve up free access will be able to set up a version of WiMAX that, like Wi-Fi, doesn't require a license. The tech specs for this everyman version aren't as impressive, though. The legal transmitting power will be lower—only four watts instead of 30—and the equipment will transmit at a frequency that doesn't travel well through buildings and trees. That means unlicensed WiMAX networks won't be able to serve more than a city block or two. And since no one can claim ownership of those frequencies, neighboring networks will interfere with each other.</p>
<p>Corporate providers and free-network supporters may talk about &quot;complementary technologies&quot; and &quot;interoperability,&quot; but the truth is that there will soon be two options for wireless—spotty coverage that's free or a strong signal that could cost as much as your cell phone plan. You can argue that the future of wireless is as much an ideological battle as a technological one. But if corporations have better technology, any debate over whether wireless should be a private profit center or a public resource will be moot.</p>
<p>Wannabe wireless philanthropists, like the city of Philadelphia, will lose technologically because they're using transmitters that can't reach beyond their own backyards. For do-gooder types, the Johnny Appleseed model—planting antennas in one building, park, or low-income neighborhood at a time—has an intrinsic appeal. But while a call to install transmitters in every block of every city makes for a great speech, it's just not that practical. </p>
<p>If they want to provide citizens with free or cheap wireless, city governments must realize that WiMAX isn't just an evil corporate tool. Unlike cell phone service, it's designed so enthusiasts can stretch the network locally, much further than they can with today's Wi-Fi hardware. While no homebrew project can compete with a corporate megatower and a license to the local airwaves, it's also true that the best way to broadcast a tower's signal into each nook and cranny in town is to set up local routers. That is, to stash low-powered WiMAX or Wi-Fi repeaters in buildings and parks. Instead of trying to make wireless a new utility, city hall should focus on wresting deals from the big telecom companies that allow local volunteers to bring WiMAX to underserved areas. Even if we don't get the Internet for free, at least the antenna-toting Johnny Appleseeds will be doing something useful.</p>
<p><em>Webhead thanks Ron Resnick of the WiMAX Forum.</em></p>Tue, 14 Sep 2004 16:03:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/09/barbed_wireless.htmlPaul Boutin2004-09-14T16:03:00ZWhy high-speed Net access won't be free.TechnologyWhy high-speed Net access won't be free.2106657Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2106657falsefalsefalseWhy high-speed Net access won't be free.Why high-speed Net access won't be free.This Is an Emergencyhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/09/this_is_an_emergency.html
<p> When I called 911 one recent evening to report a mugging, I expected one of those fast-talking emergency operators. Instead, I got a lecture.</p>
<p>&quot;Hello,&quot; a woman said.</p>
<p>&quot;Hello,&quot; I said. &quot;Is this 911?&quot;</p>
<p>&quot;No,&quot; she said.</p>
<p>After some prodding, she revealed that she did work for the New York Police Department. &quot;911 is near here,&quot; she added unhelpfully.</p>
<p>Before I could report the mugging, the officer had her own report to make. &quot;Is your carrier <a href="http://www.vonage.com/">Vonage</a>? Someone needs to make a complaint about them,&quot; she said. &quot;I'm not an emergency operator. If you was to become unconscious, I don't have your address. This isn't good.&quot;</p>
<p>I've been a happy <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2075534">Vonage subscriber</a> for a bit under a year now. Vonage is the leading American provider of Internet telephone service (also known as Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP). The base of my phone, a standard cordless model, plugs into a featureless black box, which in turn plugs into my modem. That black box turns my voice into packets of data, which are carried over the Internet, then linked back into the regular telephone system. I pay $15 a month, down from the more than $40 I was paying Verizon. Plus, I can plug in my black box when I travel, allowing me to make and receive local New York calls if I'm in Texas or Latvia.</p>
<p>Verizon still beats Vonage in an emergency, though. When you dial the magic three digits from a standard land line, your call travels to a local switching station, then bounces to a dedicated network reserved only for 911 calls. This special emergency circuit also links the call to the &quot;Automatic Number Identification/Automatic Location Identification&quot; database of phone numbers, names, and addresses. Plugging VoIP into this system isn't easy. </p>
<p>While land-line 911 calls travel on the copper wire that makes up your local phone system, a Vonage call starts online. VoIP calls enter the phone system through a local gateway that converts digital packets of sound into the analog signals that make up a typical phone call. If police responding to a VoIP 911 call tried to link the gateway's phone number to a physical address, they wouldn't find an emergency, just a room full of humming servers plugged into telephone lines.<strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>VoIP companies have come up with a solution to the gateway problem. Vonage has figured out how to program its servers to attach caller ID to outgoing calls—my calls, for example, show my 718 area code and phone number.<strong></strong>But that only works if I don't take my black box to Texas or Latvia.<strong></strong></p>
<p>At this point, creating functional 911 service means sacrificing one of the most attractive features that Vonage and the other inexpensive VoIP providers offer: portability.<strong></strong>Phone and cable giants like MCI and Time Warner Cable that have recently jumped on the VoIP bandwagon have made 911 work by restricting their service to home use. MCI, for one, provides emergency call centers the phone numbers of its VoIP customers along with the assurance that they won't move their phones around the country or around the world. But without that portability, VoIP is pretty pointless—nothing more than a (slightly) cheaper version of regular telephone service.&nbsp;<strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>The VoIP providers that allow portability, like Vonage and AT&amp;T's CallVantage, are relying on a <a href="http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=911">stop-gap solution</a>. After I plugged in my black box, I logged on to Vonage's Web site and entered my address in an online form. When I dialed 911, Vonage used my address to search a database of call-center numbers maintained by a Colorado company called Intrado. During a short pause on my end of the line, Vonage translated &quot;911&quot; into the 10-digit number for a Brooklyn call center that Intrado identified as closest to my house. </p>
<p>This system has run into problems, comical and scary, around the country. The worst arrive when customers take their black boxes on the road. Recently, puzzled Nashville, Tenn., emergency operators struggled to find a caller's address—until they realized that they were responding to an emergency in Texas. The call-center solution is also fallible because it counts on individual public-safety agencies to provide 10-digit numbers. Some pass on numbers that lead to administrative lines, like the one I got. Some provide numbers that are answered only during business hours; at other times, callers get a message telling them to dial 911.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the 911 call centers—aware that Vonage can't reliably tell them what address I'm calling from—have been reluctant to integrate VoIP numbers into their ANI/ALI databases. They've also been loath to share the secret, direct numbers for their emergency call centers, rather than administrative lines like the one I was given. Plus, their old-line computers can't read the digital information about my address that Vonage is capable of sending.</p>
<p>The VoIP/911 problem isn't totally insoluble, though. Legislation could be passed to force VoIP providers and local telephone companies to enter VoIP numbers into local address databases and/or to force emergency call centers to share their secret, direct numbers with VoIP providers. Consumers, however, would still have the burden of passing on their location every time they took their phone to a new city, even for a weekend. Alternately, emergency call centers could upgrade their computers so they can process the digital information that travels with VoIP calls—everything ranging from a caller's address to his medical records.<strong></strong>But emergency call centers are local institutions, and either of these imperfect solutions would require the kind of national standardization that it's hard to imagine without federal carrots and sticks.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a Florida company, VoIP Inc., is touting a self-consciously low-tech solution to the problem. It's a gizmo that links your VoIP phone to your old, unused land line (if you have one), which local phone companies are supposed to maintain for emergency use. I hadn't gone that low-tech the night I called 911. But the operator and I did rely on an old-fashioned method of pinpointing my location. &quot;We're near Macy's,&quot; she told me. &quot;Are you near Macy's?&quot;</p>Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:00:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/09/this_is_an_emergency.htmlBen Smith2004-09-08T22:00:00Z911 is a joke for VoIP customers.Technology911 is a joke for VoIP customers.2106424Ben SmithWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2106424falsefalsefalse911 is a joke for VoIP customers.911 is a joke for VoIP customers.Made to Orderhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/08/made_to_order.html
<p> Dustin Smith loved DJing at his friends' parties, but his MP3-filled computer just wasn't rugged or portable enough to haul across town. When Smith found a vintage OshKosh makeup case, a light went off. After buying a bunch of electronics components and making a zillion trips to the hardware store, he was done: Smith had <a href="http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/osh-kosh/">crammed an entire computer inside the retro case</a>. &quot;There's a real design aesthetic to it,&quot; he says, &quot;but I also wanted something really functional.&quot;</p>
<p>When I first saw Smith's tricked-out machine, I immediately wanted one to call my own. The makeup-case computer is an example of a &quot;<a href="http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/">casemod</a>,&quot; a modification of an interesting shell—a <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2002/12/08/coffeemaking_pc_case.html">coffee maker</a>, a <a href="http://www.mini-itx.com/projects.asp#project0087">typewriter</a>, a chrome box—so that a computer fits inside. It used to be that people didn't design their own everyday stuff—particularly not work-related tools like computers. When was the last time you trimmed goose quills to make a pen? The genius idea of industrialism was the concept of the Model T: In exchange for something cheap and well-made, we'd forgo unique, lovely design.</p>
<p>But the Model T is old news. Nowadays, people want consumer goods to have serious aesthetic appeal. If they can't find what they want in stores, they'll build it themselves. You could call it &quot;grass-roots industrial design.&quot;</p>
<p> <a>It's not </a> surprising that computers were the first to go under the knife—of all the gadgets we interact with every day, they're the ugliest. (Air conditioners are a close second.) Plus, computer components have become cheap to buy and easy to snap together: There are huge online stores devoted to providing casemodders with chips, boards, and computer fans. It's more than just computers, though. One <em>Star Wars</em> freak recently completed a three-year-long project to redesign his 1995 Honda Civic del Sol Si into a <a href="http://www.shawnandcolleen.com/shawn/Pages/hwing/history.html">replica of an A-wing fighter</a> &nbsp; <a href="http://www.slate.com#correction">*</a>—complete with a plasma-ball side cannon, U-shaped steering wheel, and &quot;talking&quot; R2-D2 head mounted on the back hood. (Now <em>that</em> takes commitment.) </p>
<p>But meticulously built spaceship cars are just the start. Do-it-yourself design will get really interesting when inventors are able to sketch something out and then hold the thing in their hands within a matter of minutes. Today, <a href="http://www.rpc.msoe.edu/">rapid-prototyping technology</a>—that is, 3-D printers that can instantly crank out a physical copy of anything you design on a computer—is available only to elite design firms. It'll get cheaper within years. Meanwhile, &quot;<a href="http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/9279971.htm">original design manufacturing</a>&quot; companies overseas are becoming expert at quickly and cheaply cranking out MP3 players and laptops to specs set by brand-name firms like Virgin or Sony. Put those trends together, and it's easy to envision an offshore service that will take my personal design for a music player and crank out 10 copies. Presto: the Clive brand MP3 player! Think of it as vanity electronics—casemodding on a superfast, global scale. </p>
<p>In her book <em> <a href="http://www.dynamist.com/tsos/">The Substance of Style</a></em>, economics pundit Virginia Postrel sort of predicts this trend. Customization is, she thinks, an inevitable result of the increasing durability of the products we buy. Since we need no longer shop for quality, we focus on design and style. There's also the Martha Stewart factor. America has always had tinkerers, including just about any teenager who ever hot-rodded a Camaro. But with the ascendancy of the home-renovation TV show, do-it-yourselfism has gone mainstream. Middle-class America is thoroughly bathed in the idea that everyone should architect their surroundings. We rip out walls, build decks, and terraform our backyards into Kubla Khanian gardens. In fact, one of the reasons The Sims<em></em>became the top-selling video game of all time is&nbsp;that it allows players to design homes, down to the pattern of the kitchen tiles.</p>
<p>In the low-tech world, there's already a booming trade in customizing everyday goods. Online stores like <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/">CafePress.com</a> and <a href="http://photo.stamps.com/">PhotoStamps.com</a> are making a mint from customers who send in artwork to be printed on personalized messenger bags, lunchboxes, or postage stamps. Still, slapping a picture on a coffee mug is one thing; designing your own TV from scratch is quite another. You could scoff that mass customization will never be a big trend. Anyone can mail off a picture of their dog to put on a mouse pad, but conceptualizing an entire electronic device takes, y'know, <em>work</em>. Nor do we always want things custom-made. Often, we crave some new gadget precisely because it <em>isn't </em>personalized. I lust after iPods or Mini Coopers not because they're unique, but because they've been so artfully made that I couldn't imagine doing it better myself. And there's also something fun about owning the exact same gadget as millions of other people. It makes you part of a tribe.</p>
<p>But maybe there'll soon be a new tribe: People who can't resist the fun of tinkering—and are armed with the technology to tinker cheaper, faster, and better than ever before. When Dustin Smith brought his OshKosh computer through airport security a while ago, a guard stopped him short. &quot;A computer? Why'd you do that?&quot; he wondered. Before Smith could say anything, the guard realized the answer: &quot;Because you could, right?&quot;</p>
<p> <a><strong><em>Correction</em></strong></a><em><strong>:</strong> This article originally and incorrectly described a </em>Star Wars <em>fan's modified car as a replica of an H-wing fighter. It is an A-wing replica. (</em> <a href="http://www.slate.com#return"><em>Return</em></a><em> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>Fri, 20 Aug 2004 14:54:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/08/made_to_order.htmlClive Thompson2004-08-20T14:54:00ZHow industrial design became a weekend hobby.TechnologyHow industrial design became a weekend hobby.2105436Clive ThompsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2105436falsefalsefalseHow industrial design became a weekend hobby.How industrial design became a weekend hobby.Fight Virus With Virushttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/07/fight_virus_with_virus.html
<p> On Monday, Web surfers faced the unthinkable: a day without Google. MyDoom.O, the latest version of the fast-spreading worm, used infected PCs to flood Google's servers in what's called a denial-of-service attack. With the <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/26/HNmydoomo_1.html">MyDoom</a> virus trolling for e-mail addresses so it could send itself to new victims, human users were pushed out of the way for a couple of hours. It only seemed like the world was ending.</p>
<p>The most frustrating thing about MyDoom is that it's not some hyper-evolved beast. The 14 iterations of the virus that have appeared since MyDoom.A emerged in January aren't stronger, faster strains that survived cures for weaker versions. All the anonymous MyDoom authors have done is look at the syntax—or even just the online descriptions—of previous MyDooms, then built new copies that differ by just a few lines of code<strong>. </strong></p>
<p>As the <em>Washington Post</em> reported yesterday, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15951-2004Jul26.html">protecting yourself</a> is easy: Install some anti-virus software and set it to automatically update itself (the default for most programs). Unfortunately, most people whose computers are infected either don't know they have a problem, or don't bother to deal with it. That's why MyDoom will keep coming back again and again. SCO and Microsoft, both earlier victims of MyDoom denial-of-service attacks, have posted $250,000 <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/31/1075340892647.html?from=storyrhs&amp;oneclick=true">bounties</a>, but neither have yielded a suspect nor deterred copycat coders. At the current rate, MyDoom.Z should debut around Christmas, forcing virus trackers to consult Dr. Seuss' <em>On Beyond Zebra!</em> to alphabetize next year's crop.</p>
<p>The only way to stop MyDoom might be to out-hack the hackers. In the past, &quot;white hat&quot; programmers have launched viruses that expose security holes without causing destruction in an attempt to make computer users more security-conscious. Last year, one programmer took the next step. As the Blaster worm circled the globe, the do-gooder released a worm called <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/nachi.mspx">Nachi</a> that infiltrated the same security hole as Blaster. But Nachi wasn't a Blaster variant, it was a Blaster antidote: It erased copies of Blaster it found on PCs it invaded, then downloaded and installed a Windows update from Microsoft to secure the computer against further Blaster (and Nachi) attacks. Ingenious! There was only one problem: Nachi <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/25/nachi_worm_infected_diebold_atms/">overloaded networks</a> with traffic, just like Blaster had.</p>
<p>So far, no one's created an effective antidote to MyDoom, which has done far more damage and shows no sign of stopping. While someone tried to repurpose Nachi for the job in February, that's the wrong approach. What we need is a final MyDoom variant—let's call it MyDoom.Omega—that breaches the exact same security holes as versions A through O, yet spreads itself slowly and carefully to prevent traffic jams. It could even launch warnings on the user's screen for a few days (&quot;Hey dummy! Click here to protect yourself!&quot;) before going ahead and patching the hole itself. </p>
<p>Maybe a program like MyDoom.Omega doesn't exist yet because the good guys don't have an incentive. Rather than offering them megabucks to squeal on the virus' creator(s), Microsoft, Google, and other MyDoom victims could challenge hackers to think up novel ways to squash the bug. Unleashing a white knight program might not offer the satisfaction of seeing a bad guy led away in flexicuffs, but it would be a lot more effective—and a lot more poetic.</p>Tue, 27 Jul 2004 22:28:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/07/fight_virus_with_virus.htmlPaul Boutin2004-07-27T22:28:00ZThat's the only way to stop MyDoom.TechnologyThe only way to stop MyDoom.2104432Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2104432falsefalsefalseThe only way to stop MyDoom.The only way to stop MyDoom.Art Mobshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/07/art_mobs.html
<p> Mobs have been getting unusually good press these days. In his excellent new book <em> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385503865/qid=1090508947/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-1118972-8132116?v=glance&amp;s=books"><em>The Wisdom of Crowds</em></a></em>, James Surowiecki (a former <strong><em>Slate </em></strong> columnist) argues that groups of people are smarter than any individual member. In <em>Smart Mobs</em>, Howard Rheingold showed how a massive gang of citizens connected by mobile phones toppled the president of the Philippines. And every day the unruly stock market, with its zillions of buy-and-sell orders, identifies a hot or cold company long before any individual analyst can spot it. Crowds, it seems, have a truly superhuman intelligence.</p>
<p>Now there's evidence they may even be creative. A few weeks ago, <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>—an &quot;open content&quot; encyclopedia where anybody can write or edit an entry—produced its <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons">300,000<sup>th</sup></a> article. At 90.1 million words, Wikipedia is larger than any other English-language encyclopedia, including the latest edition of the <em>Encyclopedia Britannica</em>, which has only 85,000 articles and 55 million words. This is all the more impressive when you realize that Wikipedia came into existence a little more than three years ago, and not a single contributor has been paid. Every word was written by volunteers, an enormous army digging out a massive anthill, grain by grain. </p>
<p>Just how inventive can an anonymous group of people be? Could an online mob produce a poem, a novel, or a painting? We like to believe that the blue bolt of artistic inspiration strikes only the individual. &quot;[The] group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man,&quot; John Steinbeck wrote in <em>East of Eden. </em>Hollywood scriptwriters constantly moan over how their brilliant ideas were mutilated by studio &quot;editing by committee.&quot;</p>
<p>But collaboration has a long history in art. Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors. And though many of today's writers and creators would never admit it, editing by committee can rescue an overindulgent work. Collaboration is old hat. </p>
<p>Still, until now it's been limited to a small handful of people, usually face to face. The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result. One intriguing example is &quot;<a href="http://www.typophile.com/smallerpicture/">Typophile: The Smaller Picture</a>,&quot; a project that let an anonymous crowd design a font. Kevan Davis, a British Web developer, created grids of pixels, 20 by 20 in size, one for each letter of the alphabet. He randomly dispersed black-and-white pixels in each. Then he put them online and let people vote on whether a particular pixel should be white or black. As thousands of people voted on each one, letters emerged, forming a democratic consensus of what the alphabet should look like. </p>
<p>Davis created animations that show each letter taking shape, and they're mesmerizing, a <a href="http://www.typophile.com/cgi-bin/smaller.cgi?pic=14&amp;anim=1">time-lapse movie</a> of a collective mind at work. Another designer took the results and produced crisper-edged versions of each letter. The <a href="http://www.imarlin.com/sandbox/smaller/">final result</a> looks like a mildly punk version of Helvetica, with occasional flashes of creative weirdness, such as the jaunty serif on the foot of the letter &quot;J.&quot;</p>
<p>Yet the process has its flaws. When the mob tried to draw a few simple pictures, it couldn't. Davis told it to draw a <a href="http://kevan.org/smaller.cgi?pic=10&amp;frame=2401">television</a>, but the image never congealed. The group agreed that the tube should be represented by empty space, but it couldn't generate any other details. An attempt at drawing a <a href="http://kevan.org/smaller.cgi?pic=3">face</a> produced an even more shapeless mess. The only partially successful picture was a <a href="http://kevan.org/smaller.cgi?pic=1">goat</a>: At around <a href="http://kevan.org/smaller.cgi?pic=1&amp;frame=4000">4,000 votes</a>, it looked pretty goatlike, and at <a href="http://kevan.org/smaller.cgi?pic=1&amp;frame=5000">5,000 votes</a> the mob revised it to make the horns curvier. But after 7,000 votes the picture decayed into a random jumble of pixels, as if the group could no longer agree on what a goat should look like. Mobs, it seems, can't draw. </p>
<p>Why did letters work, but not pictures? Probably because the second experiment was too free-form. Ask a group of people to draw the letter &quot;E,&quot; and most of them will envision something pretty similar. Ask them to draw a face, and they'll have a much broader array of opinions, and thus more disagreement. Truly huge artistic collaboration on the Internet seems to work only if the gang has a well-defined objective.</p>
<p>The Wikipedia people have been discovering this themselves, after launching a project to have people collaboratively write textbooks: <a href="http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikibooks</a>. When I spoke to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, he noted that while some textbooks are evolving nicely, most aren't experiencing the wild success of the Wikipedia. A textbook requires a consistent sense of style and a linear structure, hallmarks of a single authorial presence. An encyclopedia doesn't.</p>
<p>In a sense, the world of online collaboration is discovering what artists have always known: Rigid conventions are often crucial to producing art. Novels, poems, and oil paintings are really just structural devices that take an artist's zillion competing ideas—an internal, self-contradicting mob—and focus them into a coherent work. </p>
<p>Mind you, online collaborators are finding that freedoms are important too. The journalist JD Lasica recently put his unpublished book, <em> <a href="http://www.socialtext.net/darknet/">Darknet</a></em>, on a wiki—a type of collaboration Web site where anyone can edit a page or write a new one—and encouraged his readership to edit it. But readers mostly offered only tiny edits, such as grammatical fixes or fact-checks. Nobody plunged in and rewrote an entire section. Lasica suspects his book was too<em></em>fully formed: People didn't want to mess with something that seemed finished. He thinks a better idea would be to post a much rougher draft of the book to make it seem more like clay that can be molded. </p>
<p>One day, it's likely that an artist will discover the right mix, or some Web designer will invent an online engine that elegantly channels a million contributions into a single compelling artwork. So far, the closest we've yet come is with music, which, thanks to the influence of hip-hop, techno, and applications like <a href="http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/">GarageBand</a>, is increasingly a cut-and-paste art form. One new collaboration site is <a href="http://www.macjams.com/">MacJams</a>, where people share songs they're writing. The site recently gave birth to a jazz song called &quot;<a href="http://www.artsforge.com/mp3/rewired/boratezone4.mp3">Please Eat</a>.&quot; An artist dumped a few tracks onto MacJams, and soon three other musicians—half of the four were complete strangers—contributed a total of 36 tracks to the song. The songwriters worked well together in part because jazz is inherently collaborative and structured, so they knew in advance how to cooperate. </p>
<p>The song emerged from a completely unplanned collaboration. I clicked on the link, and the trippy, witty piece came floating out my speaker: The music of the hive.</p>Wed, 21 Jul 2004 15:07:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/07/art_mobs.htmlClive Thompson2004-07-21T15:07:00ZCan an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting?TechnologyCan an online mob create art?2104087Clive ThompsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2104087falsefalsefalseCan an online mob create art?Can an online mob create art?Are the Browser Wars Back?http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/06/are_the_browser_wars_back.html
<p>I usually don't worry about PC viruses, but last week's Scob attack snapped me awake. The clever multi-stage assault, carried out by alleged Russian spam crime lords, infiltrated corporate Web servers and then used them to infect home computers. The software that Scob (also known as <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/download_ject.mspx">Download.ject</a>) attempted to install on its victims' machines included a keystroke logger. </p>
<p>In less than a day, Internet administrators sterilized the infection by shutting down the Russian server that hosted the spyware. But not before a barrage of scary reports had circled the world. &quot;Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole,&quot; the BBC warned. (Disclosure: Microsoft owns <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>.) CNET reporter Robert Lemos zeroed in on why the attack was so scary. &quot;This time,&quot; he wrote, &quot;the flaws affect every user of Internet Explorer.&quot; That's about 95 percent of all Net users. No matter how well they had protected themselves against viruses, spyware, and everything else in the past, they were still vulnerable to yet another flaw in Microsoft's browser.</p>
<p>Scob didn't get me, but it was enough to make me ditch Explorer in favor of the much less vulnerable Firefox browser. Firefox is built and distributed free by the <a href="http://mozilla.org/">Mozilla Organization</a>, a small nonprofit corporation spun off last year from the fast-fading remnants of Netscape, which was absorbed by AOL in 1999. Firefox development and testing are mostly done by about a dozen Mozilla employees, plus a few dozen others at companies like IBM, Sun, and Red Hat. I've been using it for a week now, and I've all but forgotten about Explorer.</p>
<p>You've probably been told to dump Internet Explorer for a Mozilla browser before, by the same propeller-head geek who wants you to delete Windows from your hard drive and install Linux. You've ignored him, and good for you. Microsoft wiped out Netscape in the Browser Wars of the late 1990s not only because the company's management pushed the bounds of business ethics, but also because its engineers built a <a href="http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/html/97/13/index2a.html?tw=authoring">better browser</a>. When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale approved the Mozilla project—an open-source browser based on Netscape's code—in 1998, it seemed like a futile act of desperation. </p>
<p>But six years later, the surviving members of the Mozilla insurgency are staging a comeback. The latest version of Firefox, released this Monday, has a more professional look, online help, and a tool that automatically imports your bookmarks, history, site passwords, and other settings from Explorer. Meanwhile, all-conquering Internet Explorer has been stuck in the mud for the past year, as Microsoft stopped delivering new versions. The company now rolls out only an occasional fix as part of its Windows updates. Gates and company won the browser war, so why keep fighting it?&nbsp; </p>
<p>The problem is that hackers continue to find and exploit security holes in Explorer. Many of them take advantage of Explorer's ActiveX system, which lets Web sites download and install software onto visitors' computers, sometimes without users' knowledge. ActiveX was meant to make it easy to add the latest interactive multimedia and other features to sites, but instead it's become a tool for sneaking spyware onto unsuspecting PCs. That's why the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a partnership between the tech industry and Homeland Security, recently took the unusual step of advising people to consider switching browsers. Whether or not you do, US-CERT advises increasing your Internet Explorer security settings, per Microsoft's <a href="http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/security/0,39001150,39185013,00.htm">instructions</a>. (Alas, the higher setting disables parts of <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s interface.) Even if you stop using Explorer, other programs on your computer may still automatically launch it to connect to sites. </p>
<p>Firefox eschews ActiveX and other well-known infection paths. You can configure it to automatically download most files when you click on them, but not .exe files, which are runnable programs. I thought this was a bug before I realized Firefox was saving me from myself, since .exe files could be viruses or stealth installers.</p>
<p>For actual Web surfing, Firefox's interface is familiar enough to Explorer users. There's hardly anything to say about it, which is a compliment. Some interactive features designed exclusively for Internet Explorer won't appear, such as the pop-up menus on <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s table of contents. A few sites don't display properly, but they're pretty rare. More common are those that stupidly turn non-Explorer browsers away by claiming they're &quot;unsupported.&quot; Trusty, useful ActiveX-powered sites such as <a href="http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/">Windows Update</a> don't load at all, but that's the idea. You can always launch Internet Explorer for those when you need to.</p>
<p>Firefox also adds a productivity feature that Explorer has never gotten around to: tabbed browsing. You can open several Web pages in the same window and flip through them as tabs, similar to those used in some of Windows' dialog boxes. It's tough to understand why tabbed browsing is such an improvement until you've tried it.<strong></strong>But if you're in the habit of opening a barrage of news and blog links every morning and then reading them afterward, or clicking on several Google results from the same search, tabbed browsing is an order of magnitude more efficient and organized than popping up a whole new window for each link.</p>
<p>That said, be aware that getting started with Firefox isn't a one-click operation. After installing the browser, you'll need to reinstall <a href="http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/firefox-windows.html">plug-ins</a> for some programs, as well as Sun's Java engine for any Java-powered pages. Let me save you an hour of head-scratching here: Save Sun's Java installation <a href="http://java.sun.com/update/1.4.2/j2re-1_4_2_04-windows-i586.xpi">file</a> to your desktop, then go back to Firefox's menus and select File -&gt; Open File to install the downloaded .xpi file into the browser. That'll work where other methods fail without explanation.</p>
<p>Once you're set up, it still takes a day or two to get used to the interface and feature differences between Explorer and Firefox, as well as the fact that your favorite sites may look a little different. That's why I left it out of <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s 20-minute <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2102230/">anti-virus plan</a>. But if you've got time to make the switch, the peace of mind is worth it.&nbsp;Mozilla also makes a free e-mail program called Thunderbird and a calendar tool called Sunbird, if you want to avoid using Outlook and Outlook Express, two other virus carriers. They're nowhere near as feature-packed as Outlook, but the e-mail client includes a spam filter that works pretty well after you train it on four or five thousand messages—in my case, one week's mail.</p>
<p>Will Firefox make your computer hackproof? Even Mozilla's spokespeople stress that no software can be guaranteed to be safe, and that Firefox's XPInstall system could conceivably be tricked into installing a keystroke logger instead of Sun's Java engine. But for now, there's safety in numbers—the lack of them, that is. Internet Explorer is used by 95 percent of the world. Firefox's fan base adds up to 2 or 3 percent at most. Which browser do you think the Russian hackers are busily trying to break into again?</p>Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:03:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/06/are_the_browser_wars_back.htmlPaul Boutin2004-06-30T18:03:00ZHow Mozilla's Firefox trumps Internet Explorer.TechnologyThe browser wars are back.2103152Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2103152falsefalsefalseThe browser wars are back.The browser wars are back.Us Like Spieshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/06/us_like_spies.html
<p> The digital pests never seem to let up. For years we've dealt with worms and viruses, and now we've got spyware and adware invading our computers—hijacking browsers, popping up ads, and harvesting personal information. A recent study found that 90 percent of computers harbor this stuff, and spyware and adware are the No. 1 reason people call Dell tech support. We could be forgiven for wondering whether there's any light at the end of the tunnel. Will we ever halt these digital epidemics?</p>
<p>Here's a dismal answer: No. These afflictions stem from a thorny cultural problem: The entire software industry has been designed around our computer illiteracy. That isn't an easy, or even a possible, thing to change.</p>
<p>More than any other modern tool, computers are a total mystery to their users. Most people never open them up to fix them or to see how they work. Software is shrouded in particularly Delphic obscurity. When we want to install a new program, we just click on the installer, and presto, the elves arrive and magically scatter a zillion files all over our hard drives. Who cares how<em></em>Microsoft Word works, as long as it does? </p>
<p>Granted, consumers like it this way. We prefer our software be super-easy to install and use. The computer industry began with home-brew boxes that everyone had to program for themselves, but that was a huge hassle. The computer revolution didn't explode until the first Macintosh arrived, with its point-and-click simplicity. You didn't need to know anything about software or programming to use a Mac. We asked for ignorance, and the industry responded. </p>
<p>And now it's biting us in the rear. Consider: Most spyware arrives on our computers with our permission. We download a free application like KaZaA, or one of the many apps that deliver local weather reports or synchronize your computer's clock (usually from <a href="http://www.whenu.com/products.html">WhenU</a> or <a href="http://www.claria.com/products/index.html#fr">Claria</a>). The software asks us to click and approve a ponderously long &quot;end user license agreement.&quot; Somewhere inside that license the company explains, sotto voce, that the tool will monitor your surfing, or even control your computer remotely. Any smart computer user would never agree to such a thing.</p>
<p>But of course, nobody reads those agreements. Hell, I write about technology for a living, and <em>I </em>don't read them. Adware makers exploit our laziness. That seems kind of sneaky and underhanded, doesn't it? Except all<em></em>software makers behave the same way. Above-the-board folks such as Microsoft (which owns <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>), Yahoo, RealNetworks, and Google use equally confusing click-through agreements that you don't read either. And they also sometimes install monitoring applications, again with your supposed approval. Software is now so complex—requiring so many gazillions of tiny files all over your computer—that most consumers don't want to bother to know what's really going on. </p>
<p>The industry's cultivation of ignorance goes beyond the use of indecipherable user agreements. The software industry has lobbied hard for laws that keep you in the dark. If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.</p>
<p>Is it fair<em></em>to expect computer users to be knowledgeable about the innards of software? We use plenty of other complex, dangerous tools—such as cars—without needing to understand the fine points of their internal mechanics. But our computer ignorance is, even by those standards, horrific. When a computer user doesn't know that an &quot;.exe&quot; file is a program (and possibly a virus), it's like not knowing that cars are fueled by gas and that gas is explosive. It's basic stuff.</p>
<p>Instead of learning about computers, we rely on the software industry to save us from ourselves by deploying ever more layers of code: spam filters, virus detectors, spyware removers. Although these tools certainly help, they don't tackle the central problem of computer illiteracy. They actually make things worse. We become the dupes of software companies, who make all manner of outlandish claims about the efficacy of their goods, which consumers have few ways of assessing. I've often called tech support and been told a computer problem was &quot;my fault,&quot; only to later discover, doing online research, that it was actually a software bug.</p>
<p>It's possible, though, that our digital plagues could become a wake-up call, a way of finally getting us to pay more attention to our machines. When my computer recently became totally paralyzed with junkware, I ran <a href="http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/">Ad-aware</a> and <a href="http://www.webroot.com/wb/products/spysweeper/index.php">Webroot's Spy Sweeper</a> to get rid of much of it. But I also downloaded a diagnostic program called <a href="http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html">HijackThis</a>, which displays suspicious contents inside your computer, including the Windows registry, a list of the programs that automatically start when you boot up your computer. I spent an hour taking the names of each item—stuff like &quot;atiptaxx.exe&quot; and &quot;sgtray.exe&quot;—and running them through Google to figure out which were adware and which were legitimate. I picked up a few that the other tools hadn't caught. When I was done, it was a nice feeling, rather like pulling back the hood of a car to fix something yourself. </p>
<p>If we can cultivate even a bit more computer intelligence, we could find our digital age filled with fewer errors and pests. But it won't be easy. For example, if you want to fix your computer the way I did, be very careful: Eliminating &quot;good&quot; items from the registry can wreck your operating system. That's the crux of our digital-age dilemma: A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but total ignorance is worse.</p>Wed, 23 Jun 2004 21:55:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/06/us_like_spies.htmlClive Thompson2004-06-23T21:55:00ZHow computer users ask to be doomed to viruses and spyware.TechnologyHow computer users asked for spyware.2102856Clive ThompsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2102856falsefalsefalseHow computer users asked for spyware.How computer users asked for spyware.The Verdict: No Starzhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/06/the_verdict_no_starz.html
<p>To stop online piracy—or at least keep it to a bearable minimum—the companies whose copyrights are being violated need to offer consumers something better than what people can get for free. That's a tough challenge, but the better music services, such as iTunes and Rhapsody, have figured it out. By contrast, online movies are still a bust. You might think there's no market for people who want to watch movies on a computer, but that's only if you don't fly a lot. Lots of well-paid people spend a lot of time sitting on airplanes holding a laptop that doubles as a personal movie player. Why carry on a pack of DVDs when your disk drive will hold dozens of full-length movies? Yet while iTunes sells several million songs every week, Movielink and CinemaNow can convince consumers to pay for only about 135,000 flicks a month. That's for both services combined. </p>
<p>But John Sie, the chief executive of the Starz TV network, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/technology/14real.html">gave</a> the <em>New York Times</em> three reasons this week that <a href="http://www.real.com/partners/starz/?pcode=STZ&amp;cpath=R1R&amp;rsrc=starz_home">Starz's new movie-downloading service</a> might be worth watching. He claimed the downloads would play at full-screen size, rather than the postcard-size videos offered by other services. Second, Starz would offer hit movies like <em>Finding Nemo </em>and <em>Pirates of the Caribbean</em>, not also-rans. Finally, the service would be affordable, $12.95 a month for up to 100 screenings. (You can watch 100 movies once, one movie 100 times, or any combo in between. The movie files expire at the end of their scheduled runs on Starz—usually a few weeks.) RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, whose company partnered with Starz on the project, told the <em>Times</em> that business travelers would be its obvious early adopters.</p>
<p>But on all three points offered by Sie, Starz comes in a distant second to piracy. If Hollywood wants to wean computer users from <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2096316/">BitTorrent</a>, the movie studios will have to offer something better than this. </p>
<p>Just getting started was a challenge: The Starz site repeatedly told me I couldn't sign up for the service because I didn't have a 600 kilobit or greater network connection, even though various bandwidth-testing tools confirmed that my DSL line clocked more than double that. Then I spent an hour wrestling with the Real player, which Starz uses to browse, download, and play its movies. The player kept trying to upgrade itself unsuccessfully, rebooting my PC several times before I figured out how to trick it into running. The constant marketing come-ons from Real were annoying, especially when mixed with error messages. Installing a BitTorrent client and the DivX video player used for most pirated movies was undoubtedly easier and quicker. BitTorrent also works on Mac and Linux computers that Starz doesn't support, despite the existence of Real players for both.</p>
<p>Once I'd managed to successfully reach the Starz menu, things started to look promising. There are previews for each movie, and to my pleasant surprise I found I could download the average 500-megabyte movie in just under an hour, which is faster (and more predictable) than the one to six hours it takes to get a two-hour movie from BitTorrent. </p>
<p>After that, it was all downhill. First, the full-screen claim turned out to be bogus. My downloaded Starz copy of <em>Nemo</em> is only about 640 by 480 pixels, a size that hasn't been &quot;full screen&quot; for over a decade. On my 15-inch flat panel, the movie covered just over half the screen. Resizing the movie to full-screen mode blurred the pixel-for-pixel craftsmanship of the original. That's barely tolerable for laptop viewing while traveling and certainly not good enough to make you wire your PC to the TV to watch a movie in the living room (where Starz alone can't compete with the quality—or quantity—of shows on cable, anyway). Bootleg movies on BitTorrent are often of higher visual quality than Starz movies, thanks to DivX's compression format, which looks a lot better than Real's at the same file size. And bootleggers often scan movies at higher resolution than Starz offers—a 750 megabyte DivX of <em>Nemo</em> looks a lot better than a 500 megabyte Real file.</p>
<p>By the time I finished perusing the entire Starz <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&amp;STORY=/www/story/06-14-2004/0002192151&amp;EDATE=">catalogue</a> for this week, I realized I wasn't getting all that much for $12.95. The 100-plus title list beats watching an edited airline flick or paying hotel-movie rates for even fewer choices. But for less time and effort, BitTorrent users willing to flout copyright laws can get newly released movies for free. <em>Nemo</em> was bootlegged its first week out last year, and many appear online before they hit the theaters. Add it up, and Starz offers fewer movies than BitTorrent, at lower quality, for a higher price. </p>
<p>It's frustrating, because the movie industry could do better than the pirates if it really wanted to. A ripped DivX version of a movie is nowhere near DVD quality. If the studios sold downloadable movies that the average viewer couldn't tell from a DVD (the way MP3s offer &quot;good enough&quot; sound even though it's not CD-quality), who'd want a grainy bootleg? The studios could compete on selection, too. Instead of letting Starz's 100-movie inventory look generous, the studios need to create an online store with a catalogue comparable to Blockbuster or Netflix. </p>
<p>Sure, it's impossible to beat the pirates on price, but the movie moguls could learn from the mistakes, and the recent successes, of the music guys. For all its strengths, BitTorrent is just a file-sharing protocol. You still have to hunt down URLs for movies on the Net yourself. Once you do, they can take all day to load, and sometimes the download doesn't finish. If it does, you sometimes find you've spent hours downloading a grainy video with bad sound. An iTunes for movies—a well-designed, super user-friendly video store with fast, reliable downloads (there's no reason it couldn't use BitTorrent on the back end, linked to fast corporate servers)—would lure consumers into paying. Not by making piracy feel criminal, but by making it feel inconvenient.</p>Wed, 16 Jun 2004 22:27:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/06/the_verdict_no_starz.htmlPaul Boutin2004-06-16T22:27:00ZThe cable network's new online downloading service is just good enough to drive you to piracy.TechnologyThe verdict on movie downloads: No Starz.2102504Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2102504falsefalsefalseThe verdict on movie downloads: No Starz.The verdict on movie downloads: No Starz.A Simple Planhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/06/a_simple_plan.html
<p> The antivirus company Sophos reported last week that it sighted 959 new viruses and worms on the Net in May. Some of them, like the Sasser worm that infected a million or so computers, connect to idle home desktops, rather than arriving as e-mail attachments. Others aren't viruses but sneaky &quot;spyware&quot; that's bundled with popular programs like KaZaA. Sophos also claims that up to a third of spam is sent by PCs that have been infected with remote-control programs that can turn a computer into a spammer's zombie slave.</p>
<p>Figuring out how to secure your PC from these threats can be daunting even for serious gear-heads. Magazine articles like &quot;78 Ways To Bulletproof Your PC&quot; are 75 more than you should have to deal with. Tech blogger Dave Winer—a software architect who was tinkering with computers before most virus writers were born—proved that the problem afflicts more than newbies last month when he accidentally <a href="http://archive.scripting.com/2004/05/27#servesMeRight">zapped</a> himself with spyware, then spent days documenting his attempts to get rid of it. The costs add up fast, too. No one program protects against everything, so it's easy to spend more than $100 on second-rate software and still get infected. </p>
<p>So I whittled the world of options down to three steps that, on most PCs, can be done in less than 20 minutes. (Once you're done, you'll need to run some programs that take longer than that, but there's no need to sit and watch.) Just as important, they're all free, thanks to a mix of promotional offers and hacker idealism. Some of these instructions might seem obvious, even dumb, but I was surprised to find that many of my friends' PCs had missed one or another of them. Any computer user who got hit by the Sasser worm hadn't bothered to do the second step. Do all three, and you'll be protected against the most common infections and still be left with time and money for lunch. </p>
<p><strong>1. Set your browser and e-mail security. </strong>Nowadays, the most common Web browser and e-mail clients—Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express (Disclosure: Microsoft owns <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>)—are configured by default to be secure. But if someone else has used your PC in the past, or if you've idly poked at the configuration menus, you may be automatically downloading viruses without realizing it. All three programs contain features that automatically download and run software on the Windows operating system, including viruses.</p>
<p>Internet Explorer is easy to fix. Start the browser and select the Tools menu. Click on Internet Options, and a dialogue box will pop up. Click the tab labeled Security. Select the content zone labeled Internet, then click the button marked Default Level. Most likely it's already set that way, but this will ensure that your browser won't download and install any programs from Web pages without prompting you for permission first. I can't think of a single downside to this.</p>
<p>To make virus attachments in your e-mail easier to spot, follow About.com's simple <a href="http://antivirus.about.com/library/blext.htm">instructions</a> to set your computer to display file extensions. (If you're doing this on an office computer, don't be surprised if your system administrator has already done it.) Hiding file extensions was meant to make file names less daunting for novices: Instead of &quot;report.doc&quot; and &quot;installer.exe,&quot; they'd see &quot;report&quot; and &quot;installer,&quot; with the different file types designated by graphical icons rather than jargony file names. But virus writers quickly figured out that if they named an e-mail attachment &quot;report.doc.exe,&quot; though, it shows up onscreen as &quot;report.doc.&quot; Showing the full file names outs the two-extension trick.</p>
<p>These settings make viruses and spyware easier to spot, but they don't kill them. You can still click your way to an infection if you're not paying attention. The MyDoom virus used extra-tricky file names like &quot;document.htm&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (lots of spaces here)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; .pif.&quot; </p>
<p><strong>2. Get Microsoft's security updates. </strong>Most viruses and spyware take advantage of security holes in the Windows operating system. Microsoft has set up an automated security upgrade site at <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/protect">microsoft.com/protect</a> that will guide you through three ministeps of its own to fix the most gaping holes in the company's software. You can print out the instructions, but unless you want to learn more about how your PC works, take the automatic route: Tell the site to reach across the Net and configure your PC for you. </p>
<p>If you have Windows XP, the upgrade will turn on your built-in firewall, a program that works as a sentry to block most malicious attempts to connect to your computer. If your computer is on an office network, or if you've set up a home network for several computers, you probably already have a firewall running on a router or gateway between your local network and the rest of the Internet. In that case, don't turn on XP's firewall. It may prevent you from sharing files and printing between computers, as detailed in this <a href="http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp/ic_firewall.htm">tutorial</a>.</p>
<p>If, like most PC users, you aren't running XP, the site links to special discount offers on firewall software. Choose Computer Associates' free 12-month trial of the company's EZ Armor program, which works more or less as well as any of the others. One caveat: The EZ Armor firewall may block some legitimate connections you use, particularly P2P applications. You can usually find instructions to fix this by Googling for &quot;bittorrent firewall port,&quot; &quot;KaZaA firewall port,&quot; or &quot;[whatever the name of your file-sharing program is] firewall port.&quot;</p>
<p>Next, the site will enable Microsoft's automatic upgrades for all currently supported Windows versions. (Windows 95, 98, and NT are excluded.) Many people, including me, turned this feature off on XP a couple of years ago because it seemed like Microsoft was installing new game software or some other frivolous application every week. Microsoft's upgrades are less frequent now, and they're more focused on plugging security holes. </p>
<p>Finally, the site will direct you to a list of special offers on antivirus software. If you didn't take the free year of EZ Armor already, take it now for the antivirus software bundled with that firewall you might not need. <em>PC Magazine</em> <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,11953,00.asp">reviewed</a> EZ Armor and found plenty of shortcomings, but for free it's hard to beat. It'll meet your basic needs for the next year, giving you time to shop for other alternatives if you're so inclined (or to wait for another free offer from a newer and better application). </p>
<p><strong>3. Check for spyware. </strong>Spyware programs (alternately called &quot;trojans,&quot; among other names) aren't usually built to spy on you but to serve you targeted ads as you work. But some trojans can pilfer personal information or set up remote access to your PC for spammers or crooks. EarthLink recently reported finding a shocking average of 28 such programs installed on a random sample of its customers' machines. No one antispyware program catches them all, but a combination of <a href="http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/">Ad-aware</a> and <a href="http://www.safer-networking.org/">Spybot Search &amp; Destroy</a> makes for a pretty thorough sweep. </p>
<p>That's it, you're done. These three free steps won't make your computer 100 percent attack-proof, but they'll protect you from most of the annoying infections already out there. They would have protected you from all of this year's worst viruses<strong>—</strong>SoBig, MyDoom, Sasser, and its <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2004-06-09-sasser_x.htm?POE=click-refer">upcoming variants</a>—as well as most of the spyware hiding in Web pages and software packages. What's more, their automatic upgrades will protect you against newcomers in the future. When the cable networks start blaring about the next virus or worm, you can confidently turn the channel.</p>Thu, 10 Jun 2004 22:07:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/06/a_simple_plan.htmlPaul Boutin2004-06-10T22:07:00ZVirus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free.TechnologyVirus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free.2102230Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2102230falsefalsefalseVirus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free.Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free.Battery Not Includedhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/05/battery_not_included.html
<p>No consumer product improves more drastically, year after year, than the computer. I buy a new laptop every two years, and when I uncrated my Dell last month, it made my old machine look like a Model T. The new processor is twice as fast, the hard drive is eight times bigger, and there's free Wi-Fi to boot. But there's one thing that hasn't kept pace with the computing revolution: the battery. </p>
<p>Since the early 1990s, when the lithium-ion battery was first introduced, laptop batteries haven't gotten much smaller, and worse, they don't seem to last much longer: The battery industry admits that it is improving power capacity by a measly 8 percent a year. My new battery dies after three hours, lasting barely 20 minutes longer than my old one from two years ago. I can process cutting-edge video-game graphics on the Pentium chip, but the battery will wheeze out halfway across a trans-Atlantic flight. We've got the technology of the future, but to power it we're still rubbing two sticks together. </p>
<p>To make your computer run faster, engineers develop elegant ways to cram more circuits onto its surface. But once they've created the chip, it's pretty inert. It just sits there, like a piece of glass. A battery, in contrast, is a bubbling cauldron of chemicals. It's practically alive. A laptop battery is composed of a few pieces of metal surrounded by an &quot;electrolyte&quot; that lets charged particles flow through, generating current. It's just like the batteries you built in high-school science class, where you jammed a penny in one end of a lemon and a dime in the other, and presto: It generated a tiny current. </p>
<p>The problem is, whether you're using coins and a lemon or whether you're using lithium—the most common substance used in laptop batteries—there are only so many ways for those chemicals to behave. The reason that laptop lithium-ion batteries aren't getting radically better these days is that we have reached, as experts in the field say, &quot;the limits of the chemistry.&quot; We've learned all the tricks for improving their efficiency. In comparison, speeding up a computer chip is about shrinking the transistors and wires on a chip, and we've still got plenty smaller to go.</p>
<p>Granted, there are other<em></em>ways to get more juice out of a battery. You could make the battery bigger, to allow for more lithium and electrolyte to power it.<strong></strong>But who wants a bulkier, heavier laptop? Instead, most computer-makers focus on energy efficiency—using what little juice we have more intelligently. Intel's Centrino chip, for example, monitors what it's being asked to do and ramps down its power usage accordingly. </p>
<p>But we're cramming more and more gewgaws into our laptops all the time, and each one requires more electricity. Each new chip, each bigger screen, each Wi-Fi card cries out for more juice. And suppose you're one of those people who uses a laptop as your main computer? You're killing the battery even faster. The life span of a battery is determined in cycles—how many times you use and recharge it. A lithium-ion battery usually permits 300 to 500 cycles. The more you use it, the faster it burns through those cycles, like a cat going through its lives. </p>
<p>Another way to provide more power would be to invent a &quot;new chemistry&quot;—a new set of materials with which to build batteries—or to develop a technique for more heavily charging an existing chemistry. But there's a tradeoff:<strong></strong>Generally, the more electricity a battery can store, the more dangerous and toxic it is. Even the lithium-ion battery, a traditionally safe technology, has its own risks. <a>If it </a> were to break open, several of its chemicals can react with air or water to catch fire, which also means that water or foam-based extinguishers aren't recommended for putting them out: You need sand, sodium chloride powder, or copper powder. <a href="http://www.slate.com#correct">*</a></p>
<p>This hair-raising prospect means that anyone who wants to build a stronger battery has to deal with federal regulators, most notably the Federal Aviation Administration. If a super-potent battery caught fire on a plane, it could do serious damage to the aircraft. And if it's a choice between having my laptop conk out after three hours and having a nice powerful battery that knocks the entire plane out of the sky, I'm siding with the FAA. The lithium-ion battery, lame as it can sometimes be, hits the sweet spot between stability and usability. (Computer chips don't face these problems. When you make them faster, they get hotter, but that isn't as scary a proposition. You can deal with hot chips by installing better fans, which, of course, require ever more battery power.) </p>
<p>The great hope for the future lies with fuel cells, which are a whole new paradigm for laptop power. When they run out, you don't recharge them. You just buy new cells and shove 'em in, the same way you put double-As into a portable radio. This year, some companies promise to introduce the first cells. In the long run, they aim to have them widely available for two or three dollars a pop, with each one promising perhaps 15 hours of power. </p>
<p>But fuel cells have their own downside. If they're made with hydrogen, they produce water as a byproduct, so you'd have to cope with your laptop urinating. And the airlines aren't too keen about letting people carry hydrogen onboard either, since it can be explosive, too. Manufacturers are looking at making fuel cells safer by using less-potent fuels like ethanol and methanol instead of hydrogen, but they deliver less energy—and the FAA claims they can be a fire hazard, too. In this quest for infinite life there is, as it turns out, no holy grail.</p>
<p> <a><strong><em>Correction</em></strong></a><em><strong>, June 10, 2004:</strong>&nbsp;Originally, this piece incorrectly stated that a lithium-ion battery would not need oxygen to burn and that the fire could not be smothered. The piece also mistakenly defined the word &quot;exothermic,&quot; which means &quot;giving off heat&quot; and has been removed. (</em> <a href="http://www.slate.com#back"><em>Return</em></a><em> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>
<p><em>Webhead thanks Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the <a href="http://www.enderlegroup.com/">Enderle Group</a>, and Jeff Layton, Dell's director of engineering for product group power and reliability.&nbsp;</em></p>Wed, 19 May 2004 18:35:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/05/battery_not_included.htmlClive Thompson2004-05-19T18:35:00ZWhy your laptop is always running out of juice.TechnologyWhy laptop batteries aren't getting any better.2100785Clive ThompsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2100785falsefalsefalseWhy laptop batteries aren't getting any better.Why laptop batteries aren't getting any better.The Internet Jukeboxhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/04/the_internet_jukebox.html
<p> Streaming audio has long been regarded as the sorry second cousin to the heroic MP3. For years, Net users complained that streaming made music sound like it was being broadcast from the bottom of a bathtub, and the slightest congestion caused annoying pauses, burps, and warbles. But just as important, for decades we've treated music as our personal, tangible property. We buy albums and CDs, lend them to our friends, and sell them once we get bored. Forking over $10 a month to listen to music on demand—as the streaming-audio services at <a href="http://www.listen.com/">Rhapsody</a> and the new <a href="http://www.napster.com/">Napster</a> require—doesn't jibe with our sense that songs ought to be part of our <em>stuff</em>, not a service you pay for like cable TV.</p>
<p>But as music fans are finding out, when you buy a song online, it usually isn't property any more. It's a license, an agreement to let you use the song. And those licenses impose some maddeningly Byzantine limits on how you use your music. Most legal downloads will work only on approved devices. A song bought at <a href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/">iTunes</a> in &quot;AAC,&quot; or Advanced Audio Coding, format won't work on anything but an iPod, while songs bought at <a href="http://www.musicmatch.com/">MusicMatch</a> or Napster in Microsoft's &quot;WMA,&quot; Windows Media Audio, format won't work on iPods or many older MP3 players. And what if you get bored of that Strokes album you downloaded? Too bad: You can't sell it to anyone. That, too, would violate most of the licensing agreements. Worst of all, licenses on downloaded music can be rescinded. If the music companies want, they can &quot;turn off&quot; your right to listen to the music you've bought.</p>
<p>By using licenses, the labels and their download sites are secretly transforming music into a service—something to which you subscribe, and about which they can change the rules any time they want. But it's a particularly crappy service. Who wants to &quot;own&quot; this sort of pseudo-property, these annoying, stubborn, mulelike music files? In contrast, a music-streaming site advertises itself as a service, with an entirely different sort of consumer logic and much more satisfying results. </p>
<p>I recently tried Rhapsody, a streaming-audio service that gives you quick jukebox-style access to any song on its 30,000-album collection, for the price of 10 iTunes songs a month. My fears of lousy audio were unfounded. Rhapsody first went online in late 2001, and by now the service has vanquished any technical problems. Songs began playing in barely a second when I clicked on them, and no matter how aggressively I used my Net connection—surfing Web sites and checking e-mail while I listened—the audio never skipped or lagged. Rhapsody achieves this partly by cunning use of caching: The player uses up to a gig of space on your hard drive to store parts of your most-requested songs, the better to play them at a moment's notice. The catalog is pretty good, too, and includes everything from modern diva histrionics to postwar jazz. Rhapsody is like the mutant child of broadcast radio and a record store, with the best DNA of both.</p>
<p>Using a streaming service such as Rhapsody also allows you to opt out of the AAC vs. WMA war, a face-off that is queasily reminiscent of the fight between Betamax and VHS. You probably remember the sad fate of the losers who bought Beta movies. The downloading services are forcing you to similarly gamble about which music format will win. Right now, because of iPod and iTunes, AAC looks pretty solid. But what happens if WMA triumphs, iPods die out, and the only music players available in 2014 won't play the thousands of songs you legally bought at iTunes? (Or vice versa.)</p>
<p>Some people have already been locked out of their music, after they slammed into the &quot;three computers&quot; rule: Almost all download sites let you listen to a song on only three different computers. Author and blogger Cory Doctorow buys a new Apple iBook every year, but when he recently had to send one of his machines in for repair, he <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/26/vlc_will_play_itunes.html">got stuck</a>: His old computer couldn't play his archive of legally paid-for songs because there was no easy way to &quot;de-authorize&quot; the computer he'd sent in for repair and &quot;re-authorize&quot; the old, still-functioning one. His stuff was there, sitting on his computer, but he couldn't use it.</p>
<p>Downloaded music is designed to work with a demographically average<em></em>computer user, someone who uses only one or two computers most of the time. It actively discriminates against the sort of globe-trotting power-user whose life sprawls over lots of devices—even though those are surely the people most likely to blow tons of cash buying digital music. </p>
<p>In contrast, streaming services tend to be much more flexible. You're allowed to install the Rhapsody software on as many computers as you want, though you can only stream to one machine at a time.<strong></strong>You could show up at your friends' party, set up the software on his computer (it takes less than a minute), then compose a massive 300-song mix for the entire evening. Like cable TV, Rhapsody's goal is to keep you so happy that you come back each month with another 10 bucks. </p>
<p>Sure, I've got complaints about Rhapsody. You can't tweak the bass or treble on the sound, the search engine is lame, and the music library has many weird bald spots: only one song from <em>Nevermind </em>and almost no Madonna? (Napster, Rhapsody's main streaming rival, has a slightly different mix of music, but I find the interface clunkier.) And Rhapsody is truly suited only for people who are around broadband computers all day long. That excludes teenagers or anyone who doesn't work near a screen. More important, there are philosophical problems with music as a service. People want songs as property because they understandably want control. They don't want a music label to take their stuff away at the press of a button. </p>
<p>So, no matter how good streaming might be, it won't end the download wars. (In fact, Rhapsody itself offers 79-cent AAC downloads of most songs, though it's not the service's central focus.) The flexibility of &quot;unlocked&quot; MP3s remains the gold standard for online music. Since you can store and play MP3s any way you want, they're the most like real stuff. There are legal routes to getting MP3s online: <a href="http://www.emusic.com/">eMusic</a> sells tunes in that format, but it specializes in super-alternative music. That's why many users are cracking the digital-rights limits on their paid-for downloads. You can, for example, burn your legal downloads onto a CD and then rip them back into MP3s. It's a pain, but I've done it myself, because my old MP3 player won't play WMA or AAC files. Meanwhile, geeks are beginning to create software like PlayFair, which strips the digital-rights limits from iTunes files. </p>
<p>But hard as it may be to believe, streaming is the best online-music option for the desk-bound. I've long been a slightly guilty user of KaZaA, but so many of the files there now are &quot;decoys&quot;—files of junk noise masquerading as real songs, sneakily seeded into the network by music labels—that finding a pristine version of a song has become a serious chore. I'd rather pay a reasonable fee for instant gratification.</p>
<p>Besides, put on your Jules Verne cap. Think about what it'll be like when wireless companies finally roll out broadband networks nationwide and streaming is possible out in the streets. Imagine subscribing to something like Rhapsody on a mobile device that lets you access any song, anywhere, instantly. What will you think of your iPod and its 1,000 songs then?</p>Wed, 21 Apr 2004 22:01:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/04/the_internet_jukebox.htmlClive Thompson2004-04-21T22:01:00ZDoes Rhapsody have the answer to the downloading wars?TechnologyThe Internet jukebox vs. downloading.2099282Clive ThompsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2099282falsefalsefalseThe Internet jukebox vs. downloading.The Internet jukebox vs. downloading.Read My Mail, Pleasehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/04/read_my_mail_please.html
<p> Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were the heroes of the Net from the moment they launched their better-than-the-rest search engine in 1998, right up until two weeks ago. On April 1, they announced plans for <a href="http://www.gmail.com/">Gmail</a>, a Googleized alternative to the free Web-based e-mail services offered by Hotmail, Yahoo!, and a slew of smaller companies. Depending on your take, Gmail is either too good to be true, or it's the height of corporate arrogance, especially coming from a company whose house motto is &quot;Don't Be Evil.&quot;</p>
<p>At first, Web hipsters dismissed Gmail as an April Fool's hoax. But Google's offer is real. Gmail will provide each user an entire gigabyte of free e-mail storage. That's about 250 times the 4-megabyte limit of a basic Yahoo! Mail account and 10 times Hotmail's 100-megabyte &quot;super-user&quot; package, which costs $60 a year. In return for all that inbox space, Google wants just one favor: to be allowed to scan the content of your incoming messages and serve content-targeted ads alongside them.</p>
<p>If you haven't tried it, it sounds creepy. But after a week of testing the prerelease version of Gmail, I'm on the other side of the fence. Gmail isn't an invasion of privacy, and its ads are preferable to the giant blinking banners for diets and dating services that are splashed across my other Web mail accounts.</p>
<p>Judging by the reaction of lots of people, Google might as well have asked for everyone's ATM passwords. California state Sen. Liz Figueroa told Reuters she was<strong></strong>drafting legislation that, if passed, would prohibit the scanning of e-mail in order to serve ads. In England, watchdog group Privacy International filed a complaint that Gmail would violate the European Union's privacy laws. Silicon Valley's paper of record,<em></em>the <em>San Jose Mercury News</em>, fretted on its editorial page, &quot;If Google ogles your mail, can Ashcroft be far behind?&quot; The controversy bubbled all the way up to late night, where Conan O'Brien joked about Google inserting ads for <em>1984</em>.</p>
<p>The outcry isn't new, only the scale of it is. Ten years ago, some Web pioneers had a similarly squeamish reaction when the first search engines began crawling their sites and including them in searchable databases, along with ads matched to users' queries. As a manager for HotBot, one of the first ad-carrying search engines in the mid-1990s, I heard from plenty of Webmasters who demanded that their pages be removed from the system. Today, their objections seem quaint. </p>
<p>Ten years from now, we'll probably look back at the Gmail dust-up with similar befuddlement. Even now, most Google-bashers have one thing in common: They haven't actually laid eyes on Gmail. Critics have falsely claimed that Google staff, rather than automated software, will read your e-mail, that ads will be inserted into e-mail message text, rather than <a href="http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/screen2.html">alongside it</a> in your browser window, and that Google will collect a log of which ads are served to your account. Most important, Gmail critics have ignored the fact that automated software <em>already</em> scans the contents of your incoming e-mail messages. Antispam and antivirus software at most ISPs and corporate firewalls comb through the personal contents of your e-mail all the time. Gmail is just a little more upfront about it.</p>
<p>Gmail's ads are text-only, in the same spartan format used for the ads next to Google's search engine results. In my tests, a mailing-list discussion about in-ear headphones was flanked by terse ads for headphones and audio stores. Press releases about developments in the Wi-Fi industry were accompanied not by ads, but by links to &quot;related pages&quot; from Google's search engine. Social chit-chat, such as &quot;let's catch up&quot; or &quot;what are you doing Friday,&quot; got no ads or links at all. I tried forcing Gmail's hand with keywords like &quot;Claritin&quot; and &quot;suicide,&quot; but it ignored them.</p>
<p>Best of all, my outgoing messages are free of the appended shills tacked on by other services, such as &quot;Yahoo! Tax Center—File online by April 15&quot; or &quot;FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar—get it now!&quot; If you've ever found one of those at the bottom of an e-mail about a death in the family, Gmail's ad strategy sounds appealing, not invasive.</p>
<p>But Gmail's user-friendliness won't quiet critics who fear that Google has implemented a tool akin to <a href="http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/carnivore-faq.html">Carnivore</a>, probably far more efficiently than the FBI did. I called Google co-founder Sergey Brin about this and got a half-encouraging response. Gmail's ad server, he says, doesn't collect any info on which ads it serves to which specific users, nor does it record users' browser cookies or IP addresses. There's a twofold benefit to that. Advertisers can't get reports on who saw what, Brin says, and Google won't have personal data about your ad viewing to hand over to the Man, should a subpoena or warrant be served.</p>
<p>The real threat of using Web mail—from Google or from anyone else—is having your mail itself subpoenaed or just plain leaked. Web mail accounts have been cracked despite the best efforts of their administrators. CNET cyber-rights advocate Declan McCullagh listed past security breaches at Yahoo! and Hotmail in a <a href="http://news.com.com/2010-1032-5187543.html">column</a> this week, then slammed critics of Gmail's ad plan on his <a href="http://www.politechbot.com/">Politech</a> mailing list. &quot;I'm starting to suspect that these pro-regulatory privacy folks who are so upset about Google are really just anti-advertising,&quot; he wrote, because they haven't raised similar cries over antispam software.</p>
<p>The most obvious way for Google to mollify Gmail critics would be to allow users a chance to opt out of the targeted ads, and hope that most won't bother. Brin insists the company has no plans to do that, contrary to recent news reports, but he says it hasn't been ruled out, either. In return for turning off the company's ad targeting system, Google could offer, say, only 10 megabytes of disk space to those who opt out. It would still be a better deal than Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, and skittish customers might reconsider the ads as they near their inbox quotas. Still, critics would demand that the ad-targeting system be opt-in instead of opt-out, even though they make no similar demand for spam-filtering software. What's more, the opt-out solution wouldn't assuage non-Gmail users who fear their missives to opted-in Gmailers will be handed over to advertisers, or worse, John Ashcroft. </p>
<p>Luckily, there's a better option. Ten years ago, the privacy objections of people who didn't want their Web sites crawled by search engines were put to rest with a simple fix: Webmasters could place a file named <a href="http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm">robots.txt</a> on their sites as a &quot;No Trespassing&quot; marker, a sign that they didn't want their site to be searched. Google needs to offer a robots.txt for e-mail, some kind of tag that any Web user can include in a message to indicate that it shouldn't be scanned by Gmail software. Given that antispam and antivirus software will scan the e-mail anyway, this solution would be somewhat phony. But if McCullagh is right that Gmail-bashers are just opposed to helping advertisers, it will do the trick.</p>
<p>The Google guys need to implement this before the backlash gets out of hand. Otherwise, they may be forced to abandon the best Web mail system yet because of a few well-placed people who've never even tried it. That really would be evil.</p>Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:25:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/04/read_my_mail_please.htmlPaul Boutin2004-04-15T21:25:00ZThe silly privacy fears about Google's e-mail service.TechnologyThe silly fears about Google's e-mail service.2098946Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2098946falsefalsefalseThe silly fears about Google's e-mail service.The silly fears about Google's e-mail service.Plug and Playhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/03/plug_and_play.html
<p>Roughly 50 million homes in the United States connect to the Internet through broadband, typically cable or DSL (but to a limited degree satellite as well). Although that sounds like a lot, it's still a far cry from the nearly 70 million homes with dial-up connections. But this month, a new service is being rolled out that, over time, could dramatically change the economics of broadband Internet and transform what is largely a duopoly between cable and DSL into a competitive market.</p>
<p>The new option: connecting to the Internet through electrical sockets. In this scenario, the home user plugs a <a href="http://www.currentgroup.com/LearnMore/Technology/TechnologyDetails/4.htm">specialized modem</a> into the wall socket and is immediately brought online at speeds up to 3 megabits per second, as fast as any broadband service on the market today. Known as &quot;broadband over power lines,&quot; or BPL, the service is currently available to 16,000 homes in Cincinnati. </p>
<p>Marketed under the brand <a href="http://www.currentgroup.com/">Current Communications</a>, the Cincinnati offering came as something of a surprise. For years, the idea of delivering Internet access through power lines has been stymied by engineering problems that until recently seemed intractable. As far back as March 2000, CNET <a href="http://news.com.com/2100-1033-237628.html?tag=nl">reported</a> that companies were close to delivering high-speed Internet access through power lines, but nothing came of it. It's taken four years to turn the theory into commercial reality. Current Communications won't reveal the specifics of what made its technology perform as promised, but in general terms, what's historically hindered the deployment of BPL is that the electrical system was designed to transmit electricity and nothing else.</p>
<p>Two major obstacles make transmitting Internet signals through power lines a difficult proposition. The first is that power lines are designed not to interfere with other electromagnetic signals, such as radio and television. Metal wires made of aluminum and copper (the stuff that carries electricity) are also natural antennas. So, utility companies, in order to comply with FCC regulations over what gets broadcast where and how, learned to shield their systems from producing interference with these other licensed signals. A properly built electrical grid transmits electricity at a frequency of 60 hertz. In principle, those same wires could carry another signal, using a different frequency. The problem is that could jam up things like TV and radio transmissions. </p>
<p>Current Communications figured out a way to transmit Internet signals along another frequency—it won't disclose which, other than to say it's somewhere between 1.7 megahertz and 30 megahertz—and to comply with FCC regulations that the signal not interfere with other transmissions. And last month, the FCC <a href="http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-243879A1.doc">ruled</a> that BPL systems could go forward, clearing a major regulatory hurdle. The road's not entirely clear for the technology, however. The FCC has <a href="http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2004/01/23/3/?nc=1">acknowledged</a> that BPL transmission may interfere with amateur ham-radio broadcasts, and that problem will likely need to be solved before BPL can become as common as cable and DSL connections.</p>
<p>The other major technical challenge for BPL systems is that utilities &quot;step down&quot; electrical power from 10,000 volts to 120 volts before electricity enters the home. This is done through a transformer (visible on telephone poles as a kind of big metal bucket). By figuring out a way for Internet signals to <a href="http://www.currentgroup.com/LearnMore/Technology/TechnologyDetails/1.htm">bypass</a> the transformer, Current Communications can bring BPL into the home without the risk of bringing along deadly 10,000-volt electricity with it. </p>
<p>Current Communications and Cinergy, the Cincinnati utility that's providing the electrical grid for the service, tested the system for a year in 100 of the city's households. In addition to the 16,000 homes currently eligible for the service, they plan to offer it to 55,000 homes by the end of the year. Cinergy says it intends to bring BPL, in a second venture, to the 24 million American homes in rural communities that either have no broadband option or just one (typically DSL).</p>
<p>Current Communications, meanwhile, intends to mimic what it's done with Cinergy throughout the rest of the (non-rural) country: partner with utilities to bring BPL to as many American homes as possible. It won't be the only one trying. A company called <a href="http://www.amperion.com/">Amperion</a> has rolled out a BPL service in Ontario and is in trials with EarthLink and Progress Energy to test a similar system in North Carolina. Last October, the city of Manassas, Va., signed an agreement with <a href="http://www.powerline-plc.com/">Powerline Communications</a> to offer every household BPL access by the end of this year. Another entrant into this field is <a href="http://www.ambientcorp.com/">Ambient</a>, which is undergoing field trials in Alabama in conjunction with a subsidiary of the utility <a href="http://www.southerncompany.com/">Southern Co</a>. </p>
<p>For the moment, though, more households can buy BPL from Current Communications than from any other company. Current offers three price ranges based on speed: One megabit per second costs $29.95 per month, 2 megabits per second costs $34.95, and 3 megabits per second costs $39.95. This is about the same speed and price as DSL and cable, but there's one important difference. Current Communications delivers a &quot;symmetrical&quot; service, where your upload speed is as fast as your download speed. <a>Cable</a> and DSL in the same price range as Current Communication's offering are &quot;asymmetrical.&quot;<a href="http://www.slate.com#Correct">*</a> Your download speed may be fast, but your upload speed is only a fraction of that—typically 80 percent or 90 percent slower. (Satellite upload speeds are even worse.) The ability to deliver synchronous speeds is unique to BPL, and more and more Internet users require a fast upload speed to get the most out of the Net. File-sharers upload files all the time, but there are other examples. Internet telephony requires some amount of uploading anytime you're on the phone, and video instant-messenger applications upload data, too.</p>
<p>Understandably, utilities will be closely watching the way Cinergy works with Current Communications. If BPL is a hit with Cincinnati consumers, and it causes no problems when it comes to maintenance of the electrical grid, then it's hard to imagine why any utility would refuse to offer a similar service. BPL may even provide utilities with a benefit beyond additional revenue: The same system that transmits Internet data can be used to remotely monitor household electricity usage, obviating the need to send a technician out to inspect the household meter. The system can also provide detailed feedback on electricity usage in real time, which could potentially detect brownouts before they escalate into blackouts.</p>
<p>If BPL takes off, cable and DSL (along with satellite) will face even more pressure to lower prices while simultaneously increasing speed. That's the dynamic that made much of the rest of our technological world—from DVD players to personal computers—as cheap and ubiquitous as electricity.</p>
<p><em><strong> <a>Correction</a>, March 26, 2004:</strong> The original version of this article stated that broadband Internet services that have different upload and download speeds were &quot;asynchronous,&quot; rather than the correct term, &quot;asymmetrical.&quot; Also, it stated that all cable and DSL connections are asymmetrical. In fact, symmetrical DSL is available, but not in the price range that home users are accustomed to paying. <a href="http://www.slate.com#Cable">Return</a> to the corrected sentence.</em></p>Mon, 15 Mar 2004 18:18:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/03/plug_and_play.htmlDavid S. Bennahum2004-03-15T18:18:00ZPretty soon, you'll be able to get broadband Internet over your power lines. Maybe you already can.TechnologyCincinnati plugs into broadband over power lines.2097131David S. BennahumWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2097131falsefalsefalseCincinnati plugs into broadband over power lines.Cincinnati plugs into broadband over power lines.How To Speed-Read the Nethttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/03/how_to_speedread_the_net.html
<p>The invention of the Web browser added pictures to the Internet, but all those images still haven't made reading online a pleasant experience. If you're someone who uses the Web as your main source of news, you probably have 60 bookmarks that you never use, or you open 30 browser windows simultaneously to keep track of the articles you want to read—but you never get around to all of them. Never mind the killjoy, even on a fast connection, of waiting for some Web pages to load. Surfing within one well-designed site isn't so bad, but when you hop from site to site, there's nothing that replicates the appeal of scanning your local magazine rack or that pile of magazines splayed across your coffee table.</p>
<p>But there's a way to keep track of the <em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/">New York Times</a></em>, the <em> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/">Washington Post</a></em>, <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/">Talkingpointsmemo.com</a>, <a href="http://www.wonkette.com/">Wonkette</a>—most major newspapers and nearly all blogs—in a lightweight, speed-readable format that lets you scan dozens, even hundreds, of fresh headlines a day without the time-wasting tedium of opening one Web site after another. All you need to do is download and install an RSS reader, which is no harder than installing Netscape's browser was in 1994. You can then scroll through cleanly organized headlines and story summaries. The result is an executive summary of what's new on the Net today. When you see a story you want to read, you click on it. One screenshot is worth a thousand words: Click <a href="http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/pictures/viewer$673">here</a><strong></strong>to see an RSS reader in action.</p>
<p>RSS (&quot;Really Simple Syndication&quot; or &quot;Rich Site Summary,&quot; depending on whom you ask) has three distinct advantages over Web browsing and e-mail, the two most popular ways to read news online. First, no ads or graphics clutter the headlines and article summaries. True, most news sites make you click through to the full Web page to read the whole story, but scanning an RSS reader is still more efficient than looking at, say, the front page of the <em>New York Times</em> online. And bloggers, who don't depend on ads for survival, usually stuff their entire posts into RSS. </p>
<p>Second, an RSS reader automatically updates itself with the latest items from the sites you tell it to watch, so it's always fresh. You don't have to hop from site to site, or constantly click &quot;refresh,&quot; to know what's been published by the sites you frequent most. Lastly, you can include customized RSS &quot;feeds&quot; that cull material from multiple news sources into a single data stream. For example, John Kerry's staff provides an RSS feed on his <a href="http://blog.johnkerry.com/">blog</a> to funnel the latest coverage and endorsements to RSS-using supporters.</p>
<p>How do you get started? The first step is to install an RSS reader (also known, somewhat clumsily, as an &quot;RSS aggregator&quot;).<strong></strong>For PC users, my techie friends and the editors at <em>PC World</em> recommend <a href="http://www.sharpreader.net/">SharpReader</a>. It's free, although the developer welcomes donations from happy users. If you get error messages when you try to start it (such as, &quot;The application failed to initialize properly&quot; or, &quot;The dynamic library mscoree.dll could not be found&quot;), go to the <a href="http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/">Windows Update</a> site. There, find and install the Microsoft.NET Framework. Reboot, and you should be able to launch SharpReader. (I'm on a Mac, so I use <a href="http://www.fondantfancies.com/shrook">Shrook</a>.)</p>
<p>Once you've installed a reader, go back to your browser and open your favorite site. Most sites have a link that says &quot;RSS&quot; or an orange button that says &quot;XML.&quot; Some sites have multiple links, one for each section of the publication. Cut and paste these URLs into your reader to read the site in RSS. Sorry, there's no one-click or &quot;click here&quot; method for this yet. After a few seconds, a list of headlines should appear. Click on SharpReader's &quot;Subscribe&quot; button if you want to add the feed to your reading list. </p>
<p>There is a neat shortcut that often works in lieu of the above mouse dance. Just type the site's main URL into SharpReader's URL window (e.g., &quot;www.wonkette.com&quot;). SharpReader will go to the site and look for an RSS feed for you. If it finds one, it will automatically load it. I find this trick usually works with blogs but not with newspaper sites.</p>
<p>One nuisance is that some sites, including the<em> New York Times, </em>don't list their feeds on their home pages, even though the <em>Times </em>provides feeds for nearly 20 sections. Even more confusing, some newspapers' feeds are only available through a third-party site such as <a href="http://www.newsisfree.com/">NewsIsFree</a>, which can prove impossible to search. To find those feeds, use the <a href="http://www.syndic8.com/">Syndic8</a> search engine. (The search box is hard to find; it's halfway down the site's home page, on the left.) If your favorite site doesn't have an RSS feed, odds are it will soon: <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>&nbsp; <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2096678">launched</a> its feed today, and Amazon <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/xs/syndicate.html/103-5504869-8903035">just added</a> RSS feeds to let shoppers speed-browse its inventory. </p>
<p>To make RSS live up to its &quot;really simple&quot; moniker, I've compiled the feeds for some favorite reads—everything from <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> to the &quot;Today's Papers&quot; newspapers to some major blogs—on&nbsp; <a href="http://slate.msn.com/rss/SlateFavorites.opml">this</a> page. Just right-click on the link, save it to your desktop, then import the file to your RSS reader. To do that in SharpReader, click File, then Import Subscriptions. </p>
<p>Most RSS programs have a Preferences option that lets you tell the program how often to check sites for updates. Once you've subscribed to a feed, SharpReader will update it every hour. You can fiddle with the Preferences menu to speed that up to as little as 15 minutes.</p>
<p>For advanced info junkies, there are more extreme ways to dose yourself. <a href="http://www.feedster.com/">Feedster</a> searches the content of thousands of RSS feeds and returns the newest posts first. It's sort of the Google News for RSS, but you can find stuff posted an hour ago that won't show up on Google for days. <a href="http://www.newsgator.com/">NewsGator</a> is a program that works with Microsoft Outlook so you can sync incoming news and blogs to your PDA. </p>
<p>No need to begin by going off the deep end, though. Start with SharpReader, cut and paste the RSS links from five or 10 of your favorite sites, and you'll instantly be rewarded with faster, less frustrating Net reading. </p>Fri, 05 Mar 2004 00:10:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/03/how_to_speedread_the_net.htmlPaul Boutin2004-03-05T00:10:00ZDitch your browser—RSS makes surfing for news a joy.TechnologyHow to speed-read the Net.2096660Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2096660falsefalsefalseHow to speed-read the Net.How to speed-read the Net.Caveat MPAAhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/02/caveat_mpaa.html
<p>George Lucas is legendary for bringing digital technology into the movies, but his next release may drive fans to digital piracy instead. The first three <em>Star Wars </em>movies are scheduled to come out on DVD this September after years of delays, but the releases will include only Lucas' modified 1997 versions of his trilogy. The originals' miniature model spaceships have been replaced with computer simulations, and several key scenes have been <a href="http://www.scifimoviepage.com/art_starwars_dvd_1.html">altered</a>. Lucas, who claims the updates more closely match his vision, is adamant that fans won't get their hands on the previous takes. His executive producer told <em>USA Today</em>, &quot;The original versions technically don't exist.&quot;</p>
<p>Too late: Fans are already passing around copies of them on BitTorrent, a fast-growing file-sharing network that makes it possible to swap huge, multigigabyte files over less-than-lightning fast Internet connections.&nbsp; </p>
<p>The problem with file sharing is that most computers on the Net have ample download capacity but much slower upload speeds. If you try to download a file from my computer, my DSL connection only lets me upload it at 128 kilobits per second—not much faster than a dial-up line. You might have a 1 megabit line to your house, but a measly 128K is the most you'll get from me. BitTorrent solves that problem by finding other computers that also host the same file. By downloading, say, one-tenth of the file from 10 computers at the same time, BitTorrent puts your download capacity to full use. In fact, the more popular a file is, the faster it downloads because there are more computers with copies sharing the load. Other peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA have added this multiple-source capability, but BitTorrent seems the most efficient and aggressive at optimizing the collective bandwidth of its user population.</p>
<p>As a result, a BitTorrent user can sometimes download a DVD's worth of data (4.7 gigabytes per side) in hours, rather than days. And it's easy to use, even if you don't know how it works. Once you've downloaded and installed the BitTorrent <a href="http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html">software</a> on your computer, you can ignore it. Instead, you use your browser to find and click on Web links to &quot;torrents,&quot; or files available for sharing. Presto, up pops BitTorrent's progress bar, and your download begins. Behind the scenes, your computer simultaneously shares your downloaded file sections with others who want them. (To learn more about how it works, read this <a href="http://dessent.net/btfaq/">FAQ</a>, which will also explain why your first few downloads might be slow.) </p>
<p>The software is the invention of Bram Cohen, a 28-year-old programmer who lives in Seattle. Cohen first released BitTorrent three years ago, but its popularity has recently hit critical mass. Estimates of its user base reach into the low millions. <em>Wired</em> has nominated Cohen for software designer of the year. The<em> New York Times</em> ran a lengthy profile of him this month, reporting that BitTorrent accounts for one-tenth of the traffic on the Internet2 high-speed research network. Users are sharing thousands of movies, TV shows, Japanese anime, and entire software packages through torrent links on Web pages or through search engines such as <a href="http://www.torrentsearch.us/">Torrent Search</a>. For tech workers, it's often the fastest way to suck down the latest version of Linux so they can upgrade a bug-bitten database server this afternoon, instead of overnight.</p>
<p>Much of the stuff being shared is free of copyright restrictions, but many of the movie and TV titles at sites like <a href="http://www.suprnova.org/">SuprNova.org</a> are obviously pirated copies. Cohen has been adamant all along that he didn't build the system to Napster-ize the movie industry. In fact, he's refused to add privacy protections that could keep users from being traced by, say, Hollywood lawyers. He rebuffed me when I sought his help locating a <em>Star Wars</em> torrent: &quot;I don't pirate using BitTorrent,&quot; he said. Just what the heck is this thing for, then? He replied: &quot;Etree was my target audience.&quot;</p>
<p> <a href="http://bt.etree.org/">Etree</a> is a sort of stoner superstation for live concert recordings of the Grateful Dead, John Mayer, and other artists who actively encourage their fans to record live shows and share the bootlegs (for noncommercial purposes, of course). Unlike tiny MP3 singles, these are multihour recordings, often in high-definition audio formats. The files run to several gigabytes in size, but with BitTorrent fans don't need fast servers or a fat Internet line to share them. In effect, BitTorrent was first intended as a 21<sup>st</sup>-century upgrade for the Dead's <a href="http://www.wdirewolff.com/deadlob06.htm">taper</a> community, which dates back to the late '60s and has a well-understood ethic: Amateur live recordings should be duplicated and shared freely, but the band's studio albums should not. Cohen says he's not a Deadhead; he just thought it was an interesting project.</p>
<p>Of course, most of his users aren't so straight-laced on copyright issues. <em>Star Wars</em> purists told that their movies &quot;don't exist&quot; mocked Lucas by <a href="http://www.plastic.com/comments.html;sid=04/02/11/08194488;cid=6">posting</a> a ripped copy of a rare LaserDisc version. That may seem like justice served, but what about when September's retouched DVD release shows up as a free download as well? ''It amazes me that sites like Suprnova continue to stay up,&quot; Cohen told the <em>Times</em>, &quot;because it would be so easy to sue them.&quot; </p>
<p>When Lucas' lawyers come to wipe out the rebel alliance of <em>Star Wars</em> fans—and they will—let's hope they don't try the usual tactic of nuking the network to do it. Ditto for the Motion Picture Association of America, which has already sent a few infringement notices to BitTorrent users and has mumbled vague threats about prosecution. BitTorrent isn't just another file-sharing network. Cohen's design serves to speed up the Internet, making DVD-sized downloads possible. There are lots of uses for that, and for once we can say it with a straight face: Most of them are legal.</p>Sat, 28 Feb 2004 00:10:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/02/caveat_mpaa.htmlPaul Boutin2004-02-28T00:10:00ZMeet BitTorrent, the file-sharing network that makes trading movies a breeze.TechnologyThe smartest file-sharing network there is.2096316Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2096316falsefalsefalseThe smartest file-sharing network there is.The smartest file-sharing network there is.Can They Hear You Now?http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/02/can_they_hear_you_now.html
<p> <a>The Federal </a> Communications Commission <a href="http://www.slate.com#correct2">*</a> and the Justice Department are at loggerheads over a new problem in the war on terror: <a href="http://www.mail-archive.com/ip@v2.listbox.com/msg00725.html">how to listen in on Internet phone calls</a>. Thanks to the blistering growth of VoIP—Voice over Internet Protocol—services, which have been adopted by approximately 10 million people worldwide so far, law enforcement officials now worry that wiretapping may one day become technically obsolete. If traditional phone lines go the way of the horse and carriage, will the FBI still be able to listen in on Internet phone calls? How would it go about tapping one? Is it even possible?</p>
<p>I contacted three of the leading VoIP providers in the United States—Time Warner Cable, <a href="http://vonage.com/">Vonage</a>, and <a href="http://www.skype.com/">Skype</a>—to ask them how they would comply with a court order to permit a wiretap. As it turns out, the Justice Department has good reason to worry. Depending on the provider, tapping a VoIP call can be either tricky or impossible.</p>
<p>For Jeffrey Citron, the CEO of Vonage, the critical problem is this: The 1994 law that dictates how telecoms must cooperate with the feds (it's known as <a href="http://www.askcalea.net/calea.html">CALEA</a>) stipulates that government agents can listen in on phone calls only in real time. They are not permitted to record calls and play them back later to check for incriminating information. But as Citron explained it, on Vonage's system, it is technically impossible (for now) to listen in on a live phone call.</p>
<p>Here's why: A VoIP call transforms your voice into digital bits, then segments them into separate packets of data that are routed through the Internet and reassembled upon arrival at the other end. From an old-fashioned perspective, there is no actual &quot;sound&quot; passing through the Internet at any time—the PC or <a href="http://www.vonage.com/learn_howitworks.php">other device</a> you use to place the VoIP call digitizes your voice in your home. Of course, a huge amount of regular phone traffic is also segmented into digital packets at some point, but such calls are digitized and then reconverted into sound waves far deeper into the telephone system, at points outside private homes. Law enforcement can therefore listen in on your line within the telephone system itself; the technology to do this is already embedded in the phone company's switches.</p>
<p>In theory, Vonage could comply with a tap request by making a copy of the call in real time and streaming that call to a law enforcement agent. But that tack would violate CALEA, since Vonage would still be making a <em>copy</em> of the original call. The alternative, Citron says, is for Vonage to modify its VoIP system so that its digital routers include analog-friendly wires capable of producing a real-time sound wave. These could then be linked to a law enforcement agency, permitting simultaneous listening-in. Citron says making the shift would cost Vonage a few million dollars—before taking any action, he's awaiting further regulatory instructions from the FCC. The company has already complied with between 10 and 100 requests from various government agencies for general information (including call records and billing history), but to date, he has yet to receive a single request for a live tap into a Vonage call.</p>
<p>Time Warner Cable, which has announced that it will make VoIP available to all its digital cable markets by the end of the year, would have a much easier time wiretapping live phone calls. That's because Time Warner owns the underlying infrastructure its VoIP service relies on. So while Vonage could offer government agents access only to the handful of routers it uses to direct its calls over the wider Internet, Time Warner can offer them direct access to the cables, routers, and switches over which its VoIP calls travel. It could, in theory, open a live channel for law enforcement at the place where Time Warner's cable modem signals are routed onto the wider, public Internet. This switch, known as the <a href="http://www.xilinx.com/esp/networks_telecom/optical/net_equip/cmts.htm">Cable Modem Termination System</a>, is a natural junction where a company like Cisco, which already builds CMTS hardware, could easily and cheaply add in CALEA-compliant technology. </p>
<p>Why, then, couldn't the feds tap any VoIP call by listening in on the line at the CMTS? Because some VoIP calls are routed, digitized, or encrypted in ways that law enforcement can't decipher. Skype, which now boasts 7 million users, specializes in such encryption. The company's system is designed to thwart potential eavesdroppers, legal and otherwise. The difference begins with how the networks are designed: Both Time Warner and Vonage offer VoIP services that run through centralized networks. For instance, when I place a call through Vonage, it starts by going to a centralized Vonage computer, which in turn looks up the phone number I am dialing and routes the call over to the traditional phone system. This is a classic instance of a &quot;hub and spoke&quot; network. But Skype, built by the same people who brought us Kazaa, is a totally distributed peer-to-peer network, with <a href="http://www.skype.com/skype_p2pexplained.html">no centralized routing computers</a>. (That's possible in part because Skype calls can only be sent and received by computers—you can't call a friend with an analog phone.) As a result, the company's network looks more like a tangled spider web, and the packets that make up your voice in a Skype call are sent through myriad routes to their destination. Part of the brilliance of the Skype software is that it has learned to use desktop PCs as &quot;supernodes,&quot; each sharing some of the load needed to route Skype calls quickly to their destination. From the caller's perspective, this is all invisible: The call just works.</p>
<p>Since it's exceedingly difficult to follow the path that a Skype call makes through the network, law enforcement agents would be hard-pressed to figure out where to place a tap. But even if they could, the company has built in such strong encryption that it's all but mathematically impossible with today's best computer technology to decode the scrambled bits into a conversation. Here's how Skype explained it: &quot;Skype uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)—also known as Rijndel—which is also used by U.S. government organizations to protect sensitive information. Skype uses 256-bit encryption, which has a total of 1.1 x 10<sup>77</sup> possible keys, in order to actively encrypt the data in each Skype call or instant message.&quot; The <a>point of all this </a> mumbo-jumbo is that Skype uses an encryption algorithm <a href="http://www.slate.com#Correct">*</a> known as 256-bit AES. The National Institute of Science and Technology states that it would take a computer using present-day technology &quot;approximately 149 thousand-billion (149 trillion) years to crack a 128-bit AES key.&quot; And that's for the 128-bit version; Skype uses the more &quot;<a href="http://csrc.nist.gov/CryptoToolkit/aes/aesfact.html">secure</a>&quot; 256-bit standard. Since computers have a way of quickly getting more powerful, the institute forecasts that &quot;AES has the potential to remain secure well beyond twenty years.&quot; </p>
<p>Moreover, Skype says, the company does not keep the encryption &quot;keys&quot; that are used to encode each Skype transmission—each one is generated and then discarded by the computer that initiates the call. So government agents couldn't force Skype to turn over the keys needed to decrypt a call either. </p>
<p>Last Thursday the FCC held an <a href="http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-243868A1.pdf">open hearing</a> on the future of VoIP telecommunications. In a 4-1 decision, FCC commissioners, supported by Chairman Michael Powell, voted that a VoIP provider called <a href="http://www.freeworlddialup.com/">Free World Dialup</a> should not be subject to the same regulations as traditional phone companies—including the particulars of CALEA compliance. Instead, the FCC decided to put off the issue, stating that it would initiate a proceeding &quot;to address the technical issues associated with law-enforcement access to Internet-enabled service&quot; and &quot;identify the wiretapping capabilities required.&quot; One commissioner, Michael J. Copps strongly dissented, calling the postponement &quot;reckless.&quot;</p>
<p>But even if the FCC had ruled differently on Thursday, mandating specific rules for Internet phone calls and CALEA compliance, it couldn't have been the definitive word on the subject. </p>
<p>VoIP technology is gaining ground so fast that it may be impossible for any government agency to dictate what these networks should look like. Skype, for instance, isn't even an American company. It's legally based in Luxembourg. Increased regulation on American carriers, which could lead to higher costs for consumers, is likely to push people further toward carriers like Skype, rewarding companies that seek permissive legal jurisdictions and punishing those that try to comply with domestic regulations. It's this scenario that the Justice Department legitimately fears: Even though the Patriot Act has increased its ability to eavesdrop on Americans, companies like Skype are giving everyday people unprecedented freedom from government monitoring.</p>
<p><em><strong> <a>Correction,</a> Feb. 20, 2004:</strong></em><em>This <a>piece</a> originally stated that Skype uses an encryption algorithm built by RSA known as 256-bit AES. In fact, RSA did</em><em>not build this algorithm.&nbsp;</em><em>It was </em> <a href="http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/3-3-1.html"><em>invented</em></a><em>&nbsp;by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. (</em> <a href="http://www.slate.com#Return"><em>Return</em></a><em> to corrected sentence.) Also, due to a copy-editing error, the Federal Communications Commission was incorrectly referred to as the Federal Communications Committee. (<a href="http://www.slate.com#return2">Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)</em></p>Thu, 19 Feb 2004 22:49:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/02/can_they_hear_you_now.htmlDavid S. Bennahum2004-02-19T22:49:00ZHow the FBI eavesdrops on Internet phone calls (and why it sometimes can't).TechnologyHow to tap a VoIP call.2095777David S. BennahumWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2095777falsefalsefalseHow to tap a VoIP call.How to tap a VoIP call.Howard's Webhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/02/howards_web.html
<p>I'm going to miss Howard Dean. The rest of the race will be much less fun without him and, more to the point, without his vociferous army of supporters on the Web. Years from now, the online Deaniacs—with their Meetups, their blogs, the mailing lists they put us on without asking—will be the defining aspect of Campaign 2004. For a while there, their enthusiasm made pollsters and pundits believe that former campaign manager Joe Trippi, by substituting interactive, free-for-all dialogues for top-down, Karl Rove-style messaging, really could use the Net to take back the White House.</p>
<p>Now that the governor has dropped out, the Kerry and Edwards camps will be courting the Deaniacs' votes. But they're much less likely to embrace Trippi's supposedly Net-savvy campaign tactics, which have lately been seen as something of an embarrassment: The Dean phenomenon, it's now assumed, was a bubble as phony as a dot-com IPO. When the campaign began to falter, the <em>New Republic</em>'s Ryan Lizza offered the following postmortem: &quot;All these high-tech innovations—from the Meetups to the Web radio show—were supposed to enable the campaign to bypass the mainstream media. Instead, it seems caught in an echo chamber populated by Dean partisans.&quot; As one online grouch put it, Dean might have won if his supporters hadn't stayed home playing with their iPods. </p>
<p>Trippi himself offers a different excuse: He <a href="http://www.corante.com/loose/archives/001794.html">blames the media</a>. Before an audience of techie conference-goers last week, Trippi claimed that when Al Gore endorsed Dean, &quot;Alarm bells went off in every news room and in every campaign. The alarm said, 'Kill Howard Dean right now.' It wasn't a dot-com crash,&quot; he said. &quot;It was a dot-com miracle being shot down.&quot;</p>
<p>I don't buy either explanation, having watched the Dean bubble from birth to bust. (It was impossible not to watch, since supporters converted most of the Internet into the Dean Channel—even private tech mailing lists I'm on quickly became peppered with fund-raising pleas from Dean supporters.) The campaign wasn't just an echo chamber: Dean had a very real lead in polls taken among normal people, not just Netheads, up until the last days before Iowa. There's no reason not to believe those numbers could have translated to a proportional vote in the primaries. And Dean wasn't taken down in an orchestrated hit by TV journalists, either. He blew his lead himself, beginning the moment he started snapping at potential voters, telling Iowans like Dale Ungerer to &quot;<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/1/11/201458.shtml">sit down</a>.&quot; </p>
<p>In fact, a close look at the evidence suggests that Trippi is probably right to defend his novel approach. It didn't win Dean the nomination, but savvy use of the Internet got the candidate much further than anyone expected. Here, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> offers its end-of-term report card on Dean's Web strategy. </p>
<p><strong>Fund Raising: A+ <br /></strong>Dean raised 40 million bucks! Can Kerry—or Edwards, or any candidate—afford to pass up that kind of money when Bush is sitting on $200 million? According to contribution charts at <a href="http://www.fundrace.org/moneyindex.html">fundrace.org</a>, Dean's campaign did particularly well at drawing repeat donations from large numbers of people dispersed over a wide range of ZIP codes. Sounds like a classic example of the Internet's reach and convenience. The site also notes that Kerry hasn't done nearly as well in soliciting such donations. His campaign could take a page from Trippi's book: There's more to raising cash online than putting a donate button on a candidate's home page and presuming partisan loyalty will do the rest. It requires persistent online reminders from potential contributors' friends and from the sites they actually frequent and read. A friend surprised me yesterday by admitting he's given $150 to Dean in several batches, in part because &quot;they made it so easy.&quot;</p>
<p><strong>Media Buzz: B <br /></strong>This one's a wash at best. Only one person gets to be the Internet Candidate, so it's probably wise for Kerry and Edwards to keep mum about the power of Meetups now that they've they failed to hand the primaries to Dean. But it would be stupid to shut them down. The point is to allow your supporters to persuade the undecided one at a time. And if trusting your fans to speak for you in their own words makes you seem less aloof and less arrogant, well, Kerry the <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2074546/">Animatronic Lincoln</a> has nothing to lose here.</p>
<p><strong>Getting Out the Vote: Incomplete <br /></strong>Depending on whom you talk to, Trippi either turned a sub-Kucinich candidate into a front-runner, or he built Dean an online playground for true believers who then didn't bother to convert the rest of the electorate. Everyone's got a hunch one way or the other. But no one has yet come forward with hard research on how many of Dean's online supporters actually went out and voted for Dean, how many stayed home, and how many were eventually persuaded to vote for one of the other candidates by more traditional means. And no one has yet determined how many of the people who did vote for Dean were newbies at the polls. Without that data, I can't award a grade.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, this last point is the one that matters. Recent polls showed Kerry and Bush at a dead heat. But it's not so much a 50-50 split as 25-25—half the voting-age population has <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html">failed to show up</a> in recent elections. Bringing in new voters—if you could find a way to do it—would swing an election much more easily than converting the people who already plan to cast their ballots for the other guy. </p>
<p>Should Kerry's people encourage ex-Deaniacs to start blogging for Kerry? Should the Edwards folks recruit them to orchestrate online fund drives? If you buy the iPod theory that Dean polled high among people who wouldn't log off long enough to vote, such tactics would be suicide. But if you believe—and I do—that Dean got so much play online because Trippi's campaign energized a demographic that normally snoozes through elections, the remaining candidates should stop and think before dismissing the lessons of Dean's campaign. Perhaps Kerry should make a special trip to Harvard to court the Berkman Center's <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/berkman/topsites?sort=today">A-list</a> of bloggers for their support. I can't promise him a miracle, but I can guarantee it's one place this week he won't be asked about the intern.</p>Thu, 19 Feb 2004 00:35:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/02/howards_web.htmlPaul Boutin2004-02-19T00:35:00ZThe Internet couldn't save Dean, but it could still help Kerry.TechnologyKerry shouldn't scoff at Dean's Web campaign.2095707Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2095707falsefalsefalseKerry shouldn't scoff at Dean's Web campaign.Kerry shouldn't scoff at Dean's Web campaign.See You on the Darknethttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/01/see_you_on_the_darknet.html
<p>I have a game I play whenever I read an essay on politics written by a techie: How long until the first reference to George Orwell? Autodesk founder John Walker, in a recent 28,000-word monograph ponderously titled &quot;<a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/">The Digital Imprimatur</a>,&quot; wastes no time: His piece is subtitled &quot;How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.&quot; If your eyes don't glaze over right then, they will as soon as Walker begins to explain how by signing up for cheap broadband service, with its firewalls and dynamic IP addresses, you've <em>already compromised your freedom</em>. </p>
<p>Walker goes on, listing spam filters, antivirus software, even those perennially just-around-the-corner <a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980125.html">micropayment</a> schemes as further nails in the coffin of liberty. &quot;I have been amazed at how few comprehended how all the pieces fit together in the way I saw them inevitably converging,&quot; he says, in the patiently condescending tone of a Bond villain. But Walker's heavy-handed prose would be funnier if he didn't have a point.</p>
<p>True, his final forecast is standard tech-blog fare: Totalitarian governments (you know, like the one in <em>1984</em>) will clamp down on the Net by instituting a digital Mark of the Beast, a personally assigned crypto-certificate that tags every online transaction, letting authorities track exactly who did what, where, and when. But Walker also argues that the rest of us (the ones who aren't yet peons in Orwellian regimes) will voluntarily sign up for similar surveillance when the certificate system is marketed to us as a cure for spam, fraud, and other Internet annoyances. He's right that we'll be sold this stuff. The question is, will we buy it?</p>
<p>Personal ID certificates are already an essential part of the <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/ngscb/default.mspx">Next Generation Secure Computing Base</a>, a content-control system for PCs being developed by Microsoft (which owns <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>) and an industry consortium that includes Intel and other chip makers. Together, the alliance hopes to build an uncrackable data vault into future PCs, one that works in tandem with the Windows operating system. Users would need to present the right certificates before being allowed to transfer data into or out of the vault. Those who try to pick the locks may find they've left digital fingerprints all over the place. The system will be opt-in, as noted in the working group's <a href="https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/about/faq">FAQ</a> (See No. 25: &quot;It can be disabled permanently,&quot; unlike Orwell's telescreens). </p>
<p>I'm all for that kind of security where it belongs—I sure hope my bank adopts it. But as Walker notes, an always-on ID would take a lot of the fun out of idle Web surfing. Advocates tout secure computing as a way to protect your medical records from hackers. But who are they kidding? The biggest beneficiaries would be music companies and Hollywood studios, whose downloadable songs and movies would be much harder to pull from the vaults of individual computers and trade around the Net.</p>
<p>So why would we opt in to such a restrictive system?&nbsp;The FCC and Congress could mandate it—they're already being lobbied to create a national <a href="http://www.markgraff.com/mg_writings/FCC_Talk.pdf">Internet driver's license</a> on the grounds it'll stop everything from spam to libel to pedophilia to terrorism. Even Howard Dean plugged this proposal in a <a href="http://www.wave.com/news/press_archive/02/020327carnegiemellon.html">speech</a> two years ago (he got to Orwell on Page 6). But Walker is right. It's more likely that private companies will begin to require people to present digital IDs in the name of a better customer experience. E-commerce and entertainment sites could require them as antipiracy measures. Corporate networks could insist all inbound messages be digitally signed to minimize spam from outsiders. How would we respond? Walker thinks that with such constant incentives, average users, the people who don't spend every moment obsessing about the potential repercussions of a certificate system, might just leave the ID system on permanently.&nbsp; </p>
<p>Walker's scenario is credible enough that <em>Newsweek</em> covered his essay in an <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3606168/">article</a> that only de-Orwellized it to the extent of changing Big Brother to &quot;Big Government.&quot; But <em>Newsweek</em> also added the missing part of the story:&nbsp;a more nuanced sense of how Internet users would react to such a system. Using the Net without the feeling you're being watched, downloading and uploading stuff you'd get in trouble for leaving on your desk—come on, that's a major part of its appeal. <a>Any</a> privacy clampdown would boost outlaw computing as surely as&nbsp;the 55 mph limit did speeding <a href="http://www.slate.com#Correct">*</a>. &quot;Picture digital freedom fighters huddling in the electronic equivalent of caves, file-swapping and blogging under the radar of censors and copyright cops,&quot; <em>Newsweek</em> concluded. They might as well have added: <em>Cooooooooooool.</em></p>
<p>An <em>ad hoc</em> alliance of techno-rebels covertly transferring unauthorized data in defiance of network authorities—sound familiar, Neo? It's such a popular scenario that the same Microsoft researchers leading the company's secure computing efforts wrote a paper two years ago describing this inevitable backlash, which they dubbed the <a href="http://www.wordspy.com/words/darknet.asp">darknet</a>. The darknet! Jeez, are they <em>trying</em> to make piracy cool? Who'd want to hang out on the boring old Internet when the other kids are on the darknet? The term has been picked up by mainstream publications including <em> <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=19020">Rolling Stone</a></em>, which defined darknets (plural) as &quot;file-trading networks created by and for small, private groups of people.&quot; Instead of relying on KaZaA, these groups use programs like <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/07/29/private.fileshare/">WASTE</a> that let them swap wares on discrete networks without being remotely tracked. Even a cop with a subpoena would be hard-pressed to detect such a network's existence. </p>
<p>Microsoft's paper flatly warns that trying to shut down these networks could backfire:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is evidence that the darknet will continue to exist and provide low cost, high-quality service to a large group of consumers. This means that in many markets, the darknet will be a competitor to legal commerce. From the point of view of economic theory, this has profound implications for business strategy: for example, increased security may act as a <em>disincentive</em> to legal commerce.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's already happening, according to BigChampagne founder Eric Garland, whose company tracks and reports file-swapping behavior as a marketing tool for entertainment companies. &quot;You see people opt out at every turn,&quot; he says, when they encounter antipiracy mechanisms affixed to music and video downloads. Garland's research finds that average Net users balk at even the free-and-easy user ID system in Apple's iTunes. The result: 50 million Americans trade illegally on P2P networks, while only a few hundred thousand buy legal downloads. &quot;It's a terrible mistake to underestimate the average Internet user,&quot; Garland told me. &quot;They want to deal with the Internet on their own terms. They're not all computer savvy, but they're savvy enough to find someone who is.&quot; And the 50 million veterans of the music wars will be hard to sell on the security or convenience of any system that takes away their options.</p>
<p>Wondering how the security vs. privacy struggle might play out, I e-mailed Steven Levy, the respected tech journalist who penned the <em>Newsweek</em> article. &quot;I'm currently at <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2093615/entry/2093633">CES</a>,&quot; he replied, &quot;which is shaping up as a celebration of the stuff that gives Hollywood chills—distribution, ripping, burning, of all sorts of content (for personal use, of course).&quot; Exhibitors avoided discussing security systems that might get in the way of all that fun, Levy noted. &quot;If it's onerous out of the box&quot;—i.e., if it requires a digital driver's license that keeps users from enjoying the full benefits of the darknet—&quot;people won't use it, and won't want to buy computers that have it.&quot;</p>
<p>Walker's manifesto spells out the ugly truth: As the Net gets more powerful, other powers will feel increasingly threatened by it and try to take it under control. But to do so, they'll need the complicity of those who build the hardware and software. If the Consumer Electronics Show is any clue, the gadget makers have figured out that if the powers that be get their digital imprimatur and their secure Internet, the real money will be in darknets.</p>
<p><em><strong> <a>Correction</a>, Jan. 29, 2004:</strong> The text above originally referred to Jimmy Carter's 55 mph speed limit. But it was actually President Nixon who signed the law mandating the sluggish pace nationwide. <a href="http://www.slate.com#Any">Return</a> to the corrected sentence.</em></p>Wed, 28 Jan 2004 20:40:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/01/see_you_on_the_darknet.htmlPaul Boutin2004-01-28T20:40:00ZWhy we don't really want Internet security.TechnologyInternet security—who needs it?2094336Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2094336falsefalsefalseInternet security—who needs it?Internet security—who needs it?Playing Politicshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/01/playing_politics.html
<p>&quot;Politics,&quot; Harry Truman once said, &quot;is a fascinating game.&quot; Truman wasn't the first person to note the similarities between play and affairs of state, but these days the connection seems almost too strong. Check out the TV coverage from Iowa. With its gangs of people in team jackets frantically racing around soliciting votes, a modern political campaign reads like an epic version of Pok&eacute;mon: Gotta catch 'em all! </p>
<p>Howard Dean has proved to be the nerd most adept at mastering the joystick of our great national Playstation, the Democratic primaries. A few weeks ago, the Dean campaign released the <u><a href="http://www.deanforamericagame.com/">Howard Dean for Iowa Game</a></u>. Drop by the site, and you can enjoy the virtual thrills of traipsing across the frozen Iowa map, starting off with one campaigner—&quot;you&quot;—then trying to see how many you can convert to Dean's cause by waving signs, handing out pamphlets, and knocking on front doors. In each round there's a clock ticking in the corner, so, as in real life, you can freak out more and more as Monday approaches. Since the game went online Dec. 24, about 70,000 people have played it. (I managed to convert 146 Iowans on my first try.) </p>
<p>Garrett Graff, a spokesman for the national Dean campaign, hit his personal high score of 460 on Christmas Day. &quot;I think it's sort of addictive!&quot; he says. That, alas, is something of an exaggeration. The graphics are cartoonish, the animation is rather clunky—and your three tasks are so simple that you begin to master them after only a few minutes.</p>
<p>Not that it really matters. This game is a piece of rhetoric, not just entertainment. Sure, it's using the format of a game, but its purpose is political. As Gonzalo Frasca, one of the designers, put it, &quot;It's like a song or a jingle.&quot; Just as Jurassic politicians license a rock anthem by the Who to seem &quot;edgy,&quot; Dean's game is cultural one-upmanship for the digital age—a proclamation of how connected he is.</p>
<p>Frasca—and his co-designer Ian Bogost—have recently emerged as <u><a href="http://www.watercoolergames.org/">leading proponents</a></u> of the idea that simple online Flash games <u><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2070197/">can be used to sell a political point</a></u>. (The name of their company is <u><a href="http://www.persuasivegames.com/">Persuasive Games</a></u>.) Flash is the graffiti of the digital age, a quick and streetwise way of slapping up an interactive message in cyberspace. This makes it perfect for instantly producing simple games that react to current events. Last fall, Frasca unleashed the controversial <u><a href="http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm">September 12<sup>th</sup></a></u>, a game in which you try to bomb an Arab village to kill terrorists—but inevitably wind up killing innocents, whose grieving family members then become terrorists themselves, ensuring the game never ends.</p>
<p>&quot;It's a game as political speech,&quot; he says. Frasca and Bogost hacked the Dean game together in barely two weeks, a punk-rock pace compared to the usual two-year process of creating a rich 3D video game. That's why the Dean game is so simple and clunky, though: They're moving at the speed of political advertising. Why Dean? They believe in his policies, but they also figured the tech-friendly campaign would let them test whether their &quot;<a href="http://www.newsgaming.com/">newsgaming</a>&quot; skills could be useful in the cut-and-thrust of partisan politics.</p>
<p>Are they? Graff claims the Dean game serves a pragmatic purpose: It encourages political newbies to go to Iowa by showing them, interactively, what volunteers there do. &quot;We said, let's show them what kind of impact their visit will have. It's not natural to hand things out to total strangers!&quot;</p>
<p>In <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2092688/">last month</a>, Steven Johnson wondered why U.S. politics had never been the subject of a simulation game. He suggested it's because politicking is too complex to be captured in a game's artificial intelligence. That's certainly true of the stuff that happens on K Street; it'd be pretty hard to sim a carbon-emissions-quota lobbying effort.&nbsp; </p>
<p>But Iowa-style campaigning? That's just a numbers game—flooding the state with as many volunteers as you can. It's hard, but it ain't rocket science. Indeed, getting out the vote is the closest that politics comes to pure algorithmic physics: If your opponent has X volunteers and you have X+10, then you win. A political game hits with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but that's the point; like a political cartoon, its simplicity tries to clarify the issues.</p>
<p>Fittingly, when they crafted the Dean game, the designers borrowed heavily from stripped-down arcade principles going back practically to Pong. &quot;When you're handing out pamphlets, it's like an inverse of Pac-Man or any of those old games where you're collecting things,&quot; says Bogost. And going door-to-door, persuading voters? &quot;That's like <u><a href="http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=&amp;game_id=8977">Paperboy</a></u>,&quot; an '80s game where you try to deliver papers—and where customers who get unhappy will cancel their subscription. As with politics, the only time the game is really over is when you lose your base of support.</p>Fri, 16 Jan 2004 23:13:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/01/playing_politics.htmlClive Thompson2004-01-16T23:13:00ZHow Dean's Web game is like Pac-Man.TechnologyHow Dean's Web game is like Pac-Man.2094039Clive ThompsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2094039falsefalsefalseHow Dean's Web game is like Pac-Man.How Dean's Web game is like Pac-Man.SimCandidatehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/12/simcandidate.html
<p> If you browse through the titles and descriptions of the &quot;simulation&quot; games at any software store, you might think you were looking at the syllabus of a sociology lecture. Beyond the ever-popular <a href="http://simcity.ea.com/">SimCity</a> franchise are games such as <a href="http://www.poptop.com/Tropico.htm">Tropico</a> that let you run a virtual banana republic, or ones like <a href="http://www.civ3.com/">Civilization</a> and <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/games/empires/">Age of Empires</a> that reconstruct historical epochs with astonishing levels of detail. A recent game called <a href="http://www.eidosinteractive.co.uk/gss/republic/">Republic</a> allows players to simulate the overthrow of an authoritarian Eastern bloc regime: You can build an insurgent military force, or you can win converts through old-fashioned ideological persuasion. Now, the <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/home/default.htm">Tate Gallery</a> in London has funded an <a href="http://agoraxchange.net/">ambitious project</a> to simulate an alternate political system using the conventions of multiplayer online gaming.</p>
<p>All of which leads to a question: The U.S. presidential campaign may be the first true election of the digital age, but it's still missing one key ingredient. Where is the video-game version of Campaign 2004? Political simulations are practically ubiquitous in the gaming world, but you're more likely to find a game that will let you stage a Spartacus-style slave revolt than one that will let you win the Iowa caucuses. </p>
<p>This is a strange state of affairs, because presidential politics lends itself naturally to the idiom and audience of today's games. Political campaigns are already structured like games, with an escalating series of discrete competitions that determine the eventual winner. In addition, there's an existing body of readily available data, going back many decades, that could be harnessed to craft the simulation. And the country is filled with Monday-morning Carvilles who cultivate their own theories on how to win the Rust Belt, or why the Republican southern strategy is overrated. </p>
<p>The game mechanics would be relatively simple: a mix of Risk, SimCity, and a sports franchise simulation. Each candidate could be ranked according to various attributes, the way a football sim distinguishes between the injury-prone and the invincible, the fumblers and the golden arms. Some candidates play well on television, while others do better at rallies. Some are genius fund-raisers. Others don't connect well with Latino voters. You pick (or build) a candidate with those attributes in mind and then plan a strategy, starting with a limited campaign pot. You could skip Iowa to concentrate on New Hampshire, woo the national media and Wall Street financiers in the Northeast corridor, or spend all your cash talking trash about your opponents via negative ads. </p>
<p>A number of best-selling sports simulations could be easily translated into the world of politics. The latest version of Sega's World Series Baseball 2K3, for example, gives you an entire organization to manage. You can trade players, nurture minor leaguers, negotiate salaries, and sign free agents. Player emotions are even factored in. Bench a highly paid prima donna for a few days, and his productivity will diminish, just as it would on the real-world diamond. Sure, more people may be passionate about sports than are passionate about politics, but by the same token there are far more people out there interested in politics than in urban planning, and SimCity manages to be one of the most popular games of all time. </p>
<p>Best of all, a campaign sim could let you experiment with different historical conditions. Could Clinton have won in '92 if the economy had improved a year earlier than it did? Would Nixon have won in '68 if we hadn't been at war in Vietnam? You could even borrow a popular convention from the world of sport sims: dream match-ups. Run Reagan against Clinton, or have George W. compete against his Poppy in 1988. </p>
<p>Why hasn't a good campaign sim come to market? It may have something to do with the fact that the actual day-to-day activities of being a politician don't translate well to the game format. Because artificial-intelligence and natural-language technologies are still in their embryonic stage, complex negotiations are stilted and robotic in most games. (This isn't the case with multiplayer games, where you're negotiating with actual humans, not simulated characters.) Your ability to control the expressiveness of an onscreen character is also not terribly advanced. It's hard to imagine how a designer could make delivering a speech into a satisfying gaming experience. </p>
<p>You can see these difficulties at work in Republic, the game in which you try to topple a tyrannical regime. Anytime your character has a meeting with someone else in the world—to win support, to intimidate, or to snoop around for information on the opposition— the game reverts to a bizarre &quot;point allocation&quot; system structured somewhat like a card game. You play a &quot;hand&quot; of various persuasive strategies—such as &quot;ego boost&quot; or &quot;coax&quot;—and wait for a response from your target. After eight rounds, you've either achieved your objective or not. In a game that prides itself on verisimilitude, the whole system seems out of place. Here you are trying to overturn a brutal dictator, and you keep sitting down with potential allies to play bridge. </p>
<p>But these problems disappear if you structure the political sim around the campaign manager, rather than the politician. From that vantage point, it becomes a game of strategy and resource management, not personal or rhetorical skills. The candidate is just one of many pieces on your chessboard. The fun of the game wouldn't be about trying to perform well on <em>Meet the Press</em>; it'd be about deciding whether or not to let your politician appear on <em>Meet the Press</em>. Campaign managers have a sometimes irritating tendency to describe their job using sports and military metaphors. The simulated version of Campaign 2004 would port that rhetoric over to the game world, borrowing from the conventions of both military and sports simulations. </p>
<p>Professional athletes <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2087013/">have been known</a> to come home from a hard day on the job, kick back on the couch, fire up the PlayStation 2, and play themselves on the television. If you built enough realism into a political sim, I suspect real-world campaign managers would follow suit. It's 2 a.m. and you're in a Motel 6 in Dubuque. What would you rather do: Post to the campaign blog, or lose three hours simulating Super Tuesday?</p>Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:58:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/12/simcandidate.htmlSteven Johnson2003-12-16T18:58:00ZVideo games simulate sports, business, and war. Why not politics?TechnologyWhy isn't there a good political video game?2092688Steven JohnsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2092688falsefalsefalseWhy isn't there a good political video game?Why isn't there a good political video game?Will the Broadcast Flag Break Your TiVo?http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/11/will_the_broadcast_flag_break_your_tivo.html
<p> Television fans accustomed to recording shows and watching them later are still trying to make sense of the Federal Communications Commission's Nov. 4 ruling, which says digital TV sets built after July 2005 will need to include an anti-piracy system called a broadcast flag, meant to keep high-definition digital broadcasts from instantly becoming Internet bootlegs. Broadcast-flag technology works like this: Digital TV signals that are broadcast over the air, rather than transmitted via cable or satellite, will include an invisible data tag—the broadcast flag—along with the picture and sound. By FCC fiat, any digital TV tuner built after July 1, 2005, must refuse to allow broadcast-flagged programs to be recorded in such a way that they can be redistributed in their high-definition format. You'll be able to record Letterman tonight and watch him tomorrow but you won't be able to e-mail a copy to your friends.</p>
<p>People have been taping and sharing TV shows for years, so why should the FCC care now? Chairman Michael Powell hopes to clear America's airwaves by pushing TV broadcasters from analog to digital, which uses scarce bandwidth much more efficiently. But Hollywood moguls who make the shows broadcasters want to carry have been reluctant to let them be sent through the air in <a href="http://www.audiovideo101.com/dictionary/hdtv.asp">HDTV</a> format. It's a reasonable fear: A digital TV broadcast can be easily grabbed and saved to disk as a perfect copy of the original, which alarms the studios that produce the shows. Unless the broadcasters have a way to protect content, they won't be able to license or purchase shows, and if they don't have access to the shows, they won't be able to compete with cable and the satellite-TV folks.</p>
<p>But never mind the industry gossip. How will the broadcast flag affect your viewing?&nbsp; It'll be an annoyance for some, but it's not the end of the world some tech reporters predicted. Instead, it's more like the Big Four networks' last stand against their competitors.</p>
<p>Here are the FAQs:</p>
<p><strong>Will the broadcast flag break my TiVo?</strong></p>
<p>No. The FCC's ruling specifically requires that current consumer gear not be disabled by the broadcast flag. If you use TiVo or ReplayTV now, and you can figure out how to wire an analog line from a future digital TV tuner to your current personal video recorder (the required adapters will be selling like hotcakes), you'll still be able to record and play shows as usual. The trade-off is that your recordings won't be in the new high-definition format—they'll be converted to the same analog-signal-quality your TiVo now records.</p>
<p><strong>What about the new high-definition digital recorders? Will they allow me to time-shift shows, skip commercials, or pause live broadcasts?</strong></p>
<p>Yes. One of the biggest myths about the broadcast flag is that TV networks are pushing the flag to end time-shifting and to force viewers to watch the commercials. In reality, the flag's purpose is to stop file-sharing, not time-shifting. ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, want to protect their audience-share by offering programming that's as good as what's on HBO without having it go straight to KaZaA. </p>
<p><strong>Will I be able to trade high-definition episodes of <em>Everybody Loves Raymond</em> with other people?</strong></p>
<p>No. That's exactly what the broadcast flag aims to stop and why CBS briefly threatened to <a>stop broadcasting </a> in high-definition format without it. <a href="http://www.slate.com#Correct">*</a> But you'll still be able to make and trade lower-resolution recordings if you keep the gear you use today. That's the surprising loophole in the broadcast-flag scheme: Copyright holders seem willing to put up with bootlegs on the Net, as long as they aren't bit-for-bit high-definition copies. The flag isn't so much a roadblock as a speed bump.</p>
<p><strong>Is it true the new video recorders won't be compatible with my existing DVD player?</strong></p>
<p>Yes. The copy-protection scheme for broadcast-flag shows will require a different data format that isn't backwards-compatible with the current standard. A show recorded on a 2006 digital video recorder won't play on older DVD players. Hopefully new DVD players will be rejigged to accommodate the broadcast flag so you can record a show in your living room and play it in your bedroom, but it's not yet clear how (or whether) that will work.</p>
<p><strong>Isn't that kind of annoying?</strong></p>
<p>Absolutely. It's a good example of the problem with anti-piracy mechanisms: They often disrupt perfectly legal viewing habits as a side effect. For example, the Macrovision copy protection on all new VHS players, mandated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1999, sometimes scrambles <a href="http://www.repairfaq.org/filipg/LINK/F_MacroVision1.html#MACROVISION_013">rental tapes</a> that, in theory, it should play normally.</p>
<p><strong>I get my television via cable or satellite. Does the broadcast flag apply to me?</strong></p>
<p><strong>&nbsp;</strong>No. Cable and satellite are regulated separately from traditional through-the-air broadcasts, so your set-top box won't be watching for the flag. Cable-satellite copy-protection mechanisms are negotiated individually between the maker of your television's tuner, such as Sony, and the content providers, such as Time Warner.</p>
<p>But if you're a cable-viewer seeking an excuse to fume at the Feds, take heart. The FCC has mandated that all televisions of more than 13 inches must include a <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2071935/">digital tuner</a> by 2007. You'll have to pay an extra couple of hundred bucks for one in your next set, even though you'll never use it.</p>
<p><strong>Is there any TV gear I should stock up on before it's illegal?</strong></p>
<p>Yes. Buy a high-definition TV tuner-card for your PC before July 2005. After that you may only be able to get a crippled one, and these new cards will capture, record, and play digital broadcasts in lower resolutions. The reason for the ruling: If TV broadcasters start sending movies such as <em>Finding Nemo</em> over the air in high definition, it will be too easy for any techie to set up a PC that automatically uploads perfect copies to the Net.</p>
<p><strong>Won't that happen anyway?</strong></p>
<p>Probably.</p>
<p><strong>Where can I read the details of the broadcast-flag ruling online?</strong></p>
<p>The FCC's full report and order are available in both <a href="http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-03-273A1.doc">Word</a> and <a href="http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-03-273A1.pdf">PDF</a> format but might be hard to grok. If it's too geeky, the Center for Democracy and Technology has posted a <a href="http://www.cdt.org/copyright/broadcastflag.pdf">broadcast-flag primer</a> that translates government-speak into English.</p>
<p><em>Webhead thanks Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jeffrey Joseph of the Consumer Electronics Association.</em></p>
<p><em><strong> <a>Correction</a>, Dec. 8, 2003:</strong> This article originally said that broadcasters were waiting until the flag was in place before switching to the digital format. Although it's true that the networks won't consider switching to <em>exclusively</em> digital broadcasting until the flag is in place, networks are not waiting for the flag to commence digital broadcasting. Much of the major networks' programming is already available in high-definition digital format. (<a href="http://www.slate.com#Return">Return</a> to corrected sentence.)</em></p>Wed, 26 Nov 2003 22:14:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/11/will_the_broadcast_flag_break_your_tivo.htmlPaul Boutin2003-11-26T22:14:00ZThe FCC ruling explained.TechnologyWill the broadcast flag break your TiVo?2091723Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2091723falsefalsefalseWill the broadcast flag break your TiVo?Will the broadcast flag break your TiVo?Warren Buffet for Coupon-Clippershttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/11/warren_buffet_for_couponclippers.html
<p> Growing numbers of grocery stores no longer accept coupons printed from Web sites such as <a href="http://www.coolsavings.com/">www.coolsavings.com</a> due to an epidemic of coupon counterfeiting, the <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/technology/circuits/06coup.html">reported</a> last week. Using a combination of software and laser printers (see <a href="http://www.waspbarcode.com/default2.asp">this site</a> for an example of how easy it is to make your own bar codes at home), shoppers have been creating fake coupons that they use to get groceries for free. Because stores have no way to know whether a home-printed coupon has been counterfeited, the <em>Times</em> fretted that the fledgling business of &quot;e-couponing&quot; could be strangled in the cradle.</p>
<p>But while the somewhat fanciful vision of a nation of consumers printing their own coupons at home may be doomed, the Internet still has the potential to transform the way people clip coupons. A Web site called <a href="http://www.thegrocerygame.com/">the Grocery Game</a> analyzes and shares information about the traditional (in a previous age, we'd call them &quot;dead tree&quot;) coupons that appear in the Sunday papers. And by using that information, shoppers can deduce what coupons are offering the best deals. It appears that the Internet will change coupons the same way it's changed any number of things: by marrying collective intelligence with the power of the Net to centralize and distribute information. In the same way that readers review books on Amazon, buyers rate sellers on eBay, or friends validate friends on Friendster, grocery-shoppers are starting to use the Internet to evaluate coupons and to share their knowledge with each other. </p>
<p>The Grocery Game identifies individual supermarkets by ZIP code, examines local newspaper inserts each week, and determines whether each coupon in the insert offers a &quot;rock bottom sale&quot; (buy now!) or a mere &quot;phantom sale&quot; (don't buy; it's a coupon that, based on historical precedent, is not as low as what will be offered in the near future). The information is collected online in what's known as &quot;Teri'$ $hopping Li$t,&quot; after the Grocery Game's founder, Teri Gault. The site charges its customers $10 for eight weeks of the shopping list, targeted to their local supermarket, and according to the company, 14,000 people are paying up.</p>
<p>When Gault began her coupon analysis in the early 1980s, her motivation was poverty. She became an arbitrageur of the coupon world, meticulously tracking sales on index cards for supermarkets in Southern California, where she lives, and then making &quot;buy&quot; recommendations for herself based on historical pricing trends. By weeding out &quot;phantom sale&quot; coupons and using only &quot;rock bottom sale&quot; ones, she claims to have successfully budgeted $35 a week to feed her household. In late 1999, her husband had the idea of taking her coupon archive online for sale to subscribers, and she began publishing it in February 2000. Now she franchises the business across the country, with six franchisees covering supermarkets in 22 states, she says. (Also, Gault no longer wanders through supermarkets in Los Angeles, tracking deals. Her staff does it for her.)</p>
<p>Gault claims her shoppers can save around 70 percent each time they shop. The key to reaching this level of savings, however, is scrupulous adherence to Gault's philosophy of &quot;stockpiling.&quot; The premise is that for the first 12 weeks of shopping using the Grocery Game, you purchase a surplus of the products that are at &quot;rock bottom&quot; prices. Once the stockpile is built, then you replenish opportunistically, limiting yourself to the best sales. </p>
<p>The Internet serves as the Grocery Game's information marketplace—a nationwide network of coupon data—and it also provides a forum for real-time <a href="http://pub28.ezboard.com/bterisshoppinglist">discussions</a> by subscribers, who share tips on how best to use that week's information. Without the Internet, Gault wouldn't be able to track new deals for the week, sort the coupons into &quot;buy&quot; or &quot;ignore&quot; recommendations, and then get them in the hands of shoppers in time for that week's grocery purchases. </p>
<p>For now, 14,000 Grocery Game subscribers can do little to change the market dynamics of couponing in America. But in the mature end-state of a collaboratively filtered, &quot;<a href="http://www.smartmobs.com/index.html">smart mob</a>&quot; nation of coupon-clipping shoppers, you could see the coupon business change dramatically. Companies might see less reason to distribute lackluster &quot;phantom sale&quot; coupons, as they will be immediately revealed as unworthy of redemption. Like the Bloomberg information terminal, which gave bond traders easily accessible historical data on bond prices, or Web sites such as Expedia, which took airline-ticket pricing and made it widely available to the public, the Grocery Game could help consumers by creating more accessible, transparent information about grocery-store prices.</p>
<p>When it comes to consumer services, Internet companies can be divided into two broad categories: those with gee-whiz technology that isn't necessarily useful, and simple ideas that help people to better accomplish an existing task. The latter have fared better than the former. The Grocery Game may be less technologically impressive than personalized coupons printed from your e-mail inbox, but its impact may prove more enduring. Teri Gault took the idea of an informal shopping club—common among die-hard coupon-clippers—and recreated it online. But where a real-world club can't have more than a dozen or so members before it becomes unwieldy, Gault's online club faces no such limitations.</p>Wed, 12 Nov 2003 23:34:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/11/warren_buffet_for_couponclippers.htmlDavid S. Bennahum2003-11-12T23:34:00ZCan a Web site save you 70 percent at the grocery store?TechnologyCan the Internet change coupon-clipping?2091142David S. BennahumWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2091142falsefalsefalseCan the Internet change coupon-clipping?Can the Internet change coupon-clipping?Same Old Songhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/11/same_old_song.html
<p>Woo-hoo, Napster's back! Well, not really. The <a href="http://www.napster.com/">Napster 2.0</a> that went live last week isn't a peer-to-peer file sharing application like its predecessor. It's yet another 99-cents-per-song store in the vein of Apple's <a href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/">iTunes Music Store</a> and its Windows-only competitor, <a href="http://www.buymusic.com/">BuyMusic.com</a>. Although RealNetworks's <a href="http://www.listen.com/">Rhapsody</a> still charges a $9.95 monthly subscription fee (with an additional 79-cent charge for every song you burn to disc), it seems that the rest of the online music world is turning into the digital equivalent of a dollar store.</p>
<p>But wait a minute. Doesn't it seem odd that these fully automated online e-commerce systems, with software that ought to be able to track and respond to customer behavior instantly, unimaginatively mandate the same fixed price across the board? One of the Internet's supposed strengths is its ability to let supply and demand drive prices up and down in real time. Couldn't the music companies use the Internet as a way to introduce popularity-based pricing, meaning that the songs with the highest demand would cost the most? Compared to eBay, charging 99 cents for every song is price fixing. And while 99 cents for my favorite song seems fair, what about my not-so-favorite songs? Why do I have to pay a buck to hear Milli Vanilli again just for laughs? My brilliant idea: $10 each for the upcoming <em>Let It Be </em>remasters, a nickel apiece for the works of William Shatner.</p>
<p>But it turns out that Best Buy knows a lot more about selling music than I do. The pricing models of traditional music retailers are the latest in a long ling of things the Internet hasn't changed. The predictability of consistent pricing appeals to consumers, says University of California-Berkeley economist <a href="http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/">Hal Varian</a>. When every song is a buck, there are no unpleasant surprises (if you've ever splurged $34.99 for an import album that kind of sucked, you know the feeling). And in an online store that serves unlimited copies of every track on demand, there's no overstocked inventory to discount, nor do rare titles need to sell at a premium. As for popularity-based pricing, I've got it exactly backward: Varian thinks the most popular songs should be discounted as loss-leaders, just as in brick-and-mortar stores. </p>
<p>It's hip to claim traditional economics don't apply in cyberspace—<a href="http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/stratman_switchingcosts.shtml">Switching costs</a> are zero! It's the click of a mouse to get to a competitor!—but the online song sites may actually exact more loyalty from their customers than conventional music retailers do. Each site is, intentionally or not, a hassle to get started with. You need to download and install software, set up an account, give them your credit card number, then figure out how to use the interface to find, download, and play your music. The stores use different file formats—AAC for iTunes, Windows Media for Napster—and they store their songs in separate locations from one another on your disk drive. (Even Musicland doesn't require you to store its CDs in a separate room from where you organize the ones you bought at Tower Records.) Once you've begun building an expensive music collection from one Web site, it's unlikely you'll want to start all over again with another.</p>
<p>Although he didn't buy my harebrained pricing schemes, Varian still had&nbsp;the same&nbsp;nagging doubt about online music that I did: Is 99 cents a song too much? His informal student polls, plus an equally unscientific Billboard.com <a href="http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1957940">poll</a> of 9,000 people, suggest that many people think so. Earlier this year, Rhapsody's sales tripled when the store slashed its burn-to-disc price to 49 cents as a test run. There's only one problem: The major labels still charge 70 to 80 cents per song wholesale to supply Rhapsody and the other stores, according to the <em>New York Times</em>. Accepting less would require record companies to accept a lower profit margin from the Net than they make on store-bought CDs.</p>
<p>That may be inevitable. The Internet has shriveled a lot of companies' profit margins, and it may be the music industry's turn to live with less. But there's another reason online pricing needs to come down. Compared to the same tune on a compact disc, a download offers a lot less for your money. Everyone complains about the absence of cover art and liner notes, but a store-bought CD is more flexible, too. You can rip it and burn it to your heart's content without worrying about what machine it's registered for.</p>
<p>The compact disc is also a more reliable storage medium than your hard drive. While I was testing the new e-stores, an electric power spike in the building zapped my computer. Every single song I'd bought disappeared in an instant. While kicking myself for not making a backup, I dragged a dusty box of CDs out of the closet and slid Dzihan and Kamien's <em> <a href="http://entertainment.msn.com/album/?album=654009">Gran Riserva</a></em> into my aging disc player. Sitting on the floor between the speakers, I had to admit yet another reason people will still pay 17 bucks for a 20-year-old format: In order to make the files small enough to download quickly, some of the audio detail is stripped from a CD's songs (as I <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2076336/">wrote</a> last year, the CD itself is already a bit-stripped version of the artists' original digital studio recordings). And compared to the compressed song files on my laptop, CDs still sound just a little bit better. </p>Tue, 04 Nov 2003 21:17:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/11/same_old_song.htmlPaul Boutin2003-11-04T21:17:00ZThe Net hasn't changed music—except maybe for the worse.TechnologyWhy Best Buy still beats iTunes.2090727Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2090727falsefalsefalseWhy Best Buy still beats iTunes.Why Best Buy still beats iTunes.The Best Search Idea Since Googlehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/10/the_best_search_idea_since_google.html
<p>Amazon.com's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/ref=sib_merch_gw/103-0695435-7910212">announcement</a> this week of its new &quot;search inside&quot; feature—allowing full-text searches of over 120,000 books in its new digital archive—will probably turn out to be one of those transformative Web moments when a tool suddenly appears and six months later you can't imagine life without it. For logical reasons, Amazon seems to have designed &quot;search inside&quot; to&nbsp;help readers find text in books that they haven't bought yet. But there's just as much opportunity to apply &quot;search inside&quot; to books you already own. </p>
<p>Think about it this way: I have my thousand-book library sitting in front of me, not 2 feet from where I'm typing right now. But Jeff Bezos has something that I don't have: He's got searchable digital versions of that library or a significant portion of it. (From a very unscientific survey that I performed, it seems like Amazon has about 50 percent of my library included in the &quot;search inside&quot; archive, though that percentage is bound to increase over time.) We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of &quot;find me something I've never seen before.&quot; But real-life search is often different: You're looking for something you <em>have</em> seen before, but you've somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your glasses or your car keys. Or, in the case of books, you search for that paragraph about the Russian revolution's impact on literacy rates that you read somewhere a few years ago. You know it's in a book somewhere on your shelf, you just can't remember which one. </p>
<p>&quot;Search inside&quot; could be the perfect solution to this common problem. Instead of staring at the bookshelves for an hour, pulling out volumes, and flipping randomly through the pages, you'd log onto Amazon and &quot;search inside your library.&quot; Of course, you'd have to describe the contents of your library to Amazon, but unless your library is of Jeffersonian proportions, that's no more than an afternoon's work. (For some of us who buy almost exclusively from Amazon, you could get a jump-start by having Amazon automatically populate your &quot;search inside&quot; library with books you've already bought.) For the biblio-extroverts among us, Amazon could let you publish your library for the world to see, just as it allows users to create reading lists on various topics today. </p>
<p>Why would Amazon want to offer a service revolving around books that by definition you don't want to buy? For one, managing the library information would be trivial, given the existing scope of Amazon's database architecture. (Plus, the users would do all the data entry pro bono.) Using Amazon's search box for my own private needs, and not just shopping, makes me in the long run more dependent on Amazon (and perhaps more likely to ditch Google for Amazon down the line, as the latter's search offerings increase). Knowing something about my existing library gives Amazon even more information about my tastes for its recommendation engine. And I wouldn't object to Amazon including a list of titles not in my library that match my search request, thereby generating some new sales even when I'm browsing through old books. </p>
<p>A promising corollary effect of a &quot;search inside your library&quot; tool would be the creation of a new kind of personalized filter, this time run through other people's book collections. We all know people who are better collectors and curators than they are writers or thinkers: You wouldn't necessarily want to read an essay by them, but you'd love to spend a week browsing their library. By making Amazon libraries public, you could search through those libraries in addition to your own. You could always search the entire Amazon catalog, of course, but we all know how noisy open-ended searches can be. Most of the time, you're not just looking for information about Sylvia Plath; you're looking for a specific <em>kind</em> of information about Sylvia Plath. By organizing search around people and not just text strings, you can narrow those results dramatically. </p>
<p>Amazon could seed this by uploading &quot;celebrity libraries&quot; not unlike the &quot;celebrity playlists&quot; newly offered as part of Apple's iTunes music store. There might be hundreds of references to Russian literacy out there in the Amazon archive, but what I want are the references in David Remnick's library. Eventually, you might be able to do some artful Boolean cross-referencing: Find me all the references to Mendel that appear in both Richard Dawkins' and Francis Crick's libraries. </p>
<p>The only drawback I can imagine to this system is that the potential combinations are so tantalizing, and so fun to explore, that it's hard to imagine having time left for actually reading any of these books. But that's the price you pay for progress. </p>Fri, 24 Oct 2003 20:02:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/10/the_best_search_idea_since_google.htmlSteven Johnson2003-10-24T20:02:00ZHow Amazon can make money from books you already own.TechnologyAmazon's amazing new search engine.2090298Steven JohnsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2090298falsefalsefalseAmazon's amazing new search engine.Amazon's amazing new search engine.The 64-Bit Questionhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/10/the_64bit_question.html
<p>For status-conscious PC owners, it's time to toss the Pentium. A new 64-bit Athlon CPU from AMD was dubbed the &quot;<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112603,00.asp">fastest ever</a>&quot; last month by <em>PC World</em> magazine. Racing a few AMD-equipped computers against Intel's latest Pentium 4 models, the magazine deemed the Athlon 64s a good 10 percent faster overall.</p>
<p>AMD, long a distant second to Intel in the microprocessor business, is gunning for more than the pure speed crown. The company claims its 64-bit chip will launch a new era of &quot;<a href="http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_9488^9563,00.html">cinematic computing</a>,&quot; the term used by makers of graphics cards to suggest computer animation so rich it looks like video. But boilerplate hyperbole doesn't answer the basic questions: What exactly is a 64-bit CPU? More important, should you buy one?</p>
<p>First, the 64-bit question. A CPU is the computer's central processing unit (you probably knew that), where most of the computing gets done. Sixty-four bits is the measure of the chip's <a href="http://www.computeruser.com/resources/dictionary/definition.html?lookup=5820">word</a> length, the maximum number of bits (the basic 1's and 0's of digital data) that will fit into each of the chip's internal registers. (Registers are where programming instructions and incoming data are placed in order to perform calculations with them.) </p>
<p>Current CPUs for PCs have eight registers that hold 32 bits each, which imposes two limits on them. First, they can't access more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. That's because each byte (a byte is eight bits, treated as one chunk of data) of RAM has a unique address number that needs to fit into one register. Since each bit has at most two possible values—0 or 1—a 32-bit PC can handle 2<sup>32 </sup>addresses,<sup></sup>which multiplies out to 4 gigabytes of RAM. Upgrading to 64-bit registers lets the chip access 2<sup>64 </sup>bytes—that's 18 <em>billion</em> gigabytes, more RAM than exists on the entire planet.</p>
<p>Second, on a 32-bit machine, numbers that run longer than 32 bits (for example, fussy values of <em>pi</em>) require lots of juggling in order to perform calculations. That slows down computer-aided engineering and animation, corporate data mining, and other number-crunching applications. It adds bugs, too, as these overlong numbers are shuffled among registers. Upping the register size to 64 bits is like widening the freeway, which is why high-end servers and professional graphics workstations moved to 64-bit processors years ago.</p>
<p>On our desktops, though, most of us haven't had a pressing need for the upgrade. A 64-bit CPU won't make Microsoft Office run any faster, and it doesn't speed up e-mail or Web surfing. It won't help anyone this side of Warren Buffett with the family spreadsheets. That's why Intel decided not to develop a 64-bit Pentium, putting its efforts instead into a 64-bit chip called Itanium meant to run specialized applications in corporate backrooms rather than consumer software on home PCs.</p>
<p>AMD is pushing the 64-bit label in hopes that, like Microsoft shrugging off the Internet fad a decade ago, Intel has woefully misjudged the demands of its customers. There's also the hope that computer buyers will treat 64-bit computers like they do computers with more gigahertz—they don't know what it is, but they assume that more is better.</p>
<p>But right now, there are only two obvious uses for a 64-bit PC at home: games and video. For video, doubling the CPU's word size means the billions of bits in a movie can be encoded and decoded more efficiently, enabling higher resolutions and faster editing. </p>
<p>Games work differently. A separate graphics chip renders the videolike images, while the CPU usually calculates the behavior, position, and motion of each object in the game—whether it's the physics of a bouncing ball or the sneaky moves of a robot adversary. Game programmers say the problem with Pentiums isn't that they have 32-bit registers, but that they have only eight of them. The new Athlon tackles that, too, sporting 16 double-wide registers. Rebuilt 64-bit editions of games will be able to use those extra registers to calculate more realistic motion and faster-thinking opponents.</p>
<p>So, the buyer's guide is easy. If you absolutely must get a new PC now and want the fastest available, AMD has the season's hot chip. Keep in mind, however, that its raw speed has nothing to do with the fact that its word length is 64 bits. The era of &quot;cinematic computing&quot; won't kick in until there's software written for the chip's 64-bit capabilities and its extra set of registers. If you have to buy a PC now, you might as well buy a 64-bit one, so you're not disappointed when Microsoft (which owns <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>) puts out its 64-bit Windows XP sometime next year, or when the game-makers flood next year's holiday shopping season with 64-bit titles. </p>
<p>But if you can wait, there's no rush. Save your money for Christmas 2004. By then, not only will there be software that shows off your computer's eye-popping capacity, but also—and just as important—your $3,000 will buy a much more powerful Athlon.</p>
<p><em>Webhead</em><em> thanks programmers Timothy Thibault of <a href="http://www.nightlightstudios.com/">Nightlight Studios</a>, Adam Sah of <a href="http://www.addamark.com/">Addamark Technologies</a>, and Darrius Thompson of <a href="http://www.divxnetworks.com/">DivX Networks</a>.</em></p>Fri, 24 Oct 2003 14:49:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/10/the_64bit_question.htmlPaul Boutin2003-10-24T14:49:00ZAMD has built the world's fastest PC. Should you buy one?TechnologyAthlon's 64-bit question.2090247Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2090247falsefalsefalseAthlon's 64-bit question.Athlon's 64-bit question.You Can Hear Verizon Nowhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/10/you_can_hear_verizon_now.html
<p> For those of you who haven't heard of <a href="http://www.skype.com/">Skype</a>, the latest white-hot Internet technology and new social phenomenon, here's what you need to know: It's a free piece of software (of course!) that you can download to your PC; suitably armed with speakers and a microphone, you'll then be able to &quot;call&quot; and talk to anyone else in the world who's on Skype. In the less than two months it's been available, 1.6 million people have downloaded the software, setting a world record for this kind of thing. As a crude measure of buzz, after six weeks of life the word &quot;Skype&quot; generates more than 2.8 million pages on Google. As a point of comparison &quot;<a href="http://www.kazaa.com/">KaZaA</a>,&quot; which is Skype's progenitor (the two Swedes who invented KaZaA invented Skype), appears nearly 4.4 million times.</p>
<p>Much as KaZaA (and its predecessor, Napster) sent the music business into a psychological and financial tailspin, Skype threatens to similarly unsettle the phone business. But unlike KaZaA—which, to be clear, is about stealing music—Skype is engaging in a fair fight. It's not stealing phone calls. It's just turning the Internet into a cheap and effective phone system that anyone can access. (And the sound is amazing: In full stereo, it's FM to your telephone's AM.) The biggest potential losers in all this are the descendants of Ma Bell—those regional local telephone companies that were spun off some two decades ago. </p>
<p>And the most vulnerable of the Baby Bells is Verizon. Seeking temporary refuge behind technological Maginot Lines (also known as regulatory stays), Verizon is stuck with an increasingly anachronistic legacy. In four key communications sectors of the future, Verizon is on the defensive. Here is an autopsy of the corporate equivalent of the walking dead.</p>
<p><strong>Problem No. 1: Broadband Internet. </strong>When it comes to broadband, Verizon offers DSL, a technology that is inferior to cable. It's slower and&nbsp;less scalable in terms of bringing on more bandwidth. DSL is harder to install, troubleshoot (forgot your password? You'll get a new one in the mail—paper mail that is—three days later), and use. Consequently, the cable companies are eating Verizon's lunch. (<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2060774/">This <em><strong>Slate</strong></em> article</a> has more on why DSL sucks.)</p>
<p>About 22 million people subscribe to either DSL or cable broadband Internet access, and of those, cable has <a href="http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0307/">twice the penetration</a> of DSL. That ratio will only get worse, as DSL is the older, established technology (DSL originated as a <a href="http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/K/kludge.html">kludge</a> to get better data speeds out of old copper wires). Consequently, DSL providers like Verizon are trying to attract customers by slashing prices, a short-term fix with dangerous long-term consequences. At some point DSL could become unprofitable, generating insufficient cash flow to finance investment in upgrades.</p>
<p><strong>Problem No. 2: Broadband Wi-Fi. </strong>Then there's the nascent broadband Wi-Fi market, which is turning high-speed wired connections into superfast wireless connections. Time Warner Cable has rolled out a <a href="http://www3.twcnyc.com/NASApp/CS/ContentServer?GXHC_gx_session_id_=GXLiteSessionID--5686612821554025112&amp;pagename=twcnyc/internet&amp;mysect=internet/rr_wireless">broadband Wi-Fi modem</a>, allowing its Internet users to upgrade their broadband Internet connection into a wireless connection for $3.95 a month. Verizon's response to broadband Wi-Fi? Instead of building a supercheap, superfast nationwide Wi-Fi network, Verizon has decided to put wireless &quot;hot spots&quot; <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,58830,00.html">in the casements of public telephone booths in Manhattan</a>.</p>
<p>The idea is that Verizon's DSL subscribers, as a reward for their loyalty, can go online wirelessly for free through Verizon whenever they find themselves near a Wi-Fi-enabled pay phone. A &quot;killer app&quot; this is not. Manhattan is unlike any other American city. It's hard to imagine people on the freeway in St. Louis going online while zipping by pay phones at 65 miles an hour. In the cable world, Wi-Fi base stations are seamlessly integrated within the cable modem, which happens to sit where it's most effective: in your house.</p>
<p><strong>Problem No. 3: Wireless portability. </strong>The wireless telephone business is a savage industry, where acquiring a new customer can cost $300 per person once you factor in the subsidy for the phone, which is usually sold well below cost, and the marketing and promotion efforts that got you to walk into the store. And things are about to get worse. After years of prevarications, appeals, and foot-dragging by cell phone companies, on Nov. 24 the carriers are being forced to let you change your cell phone provider while keeping the same phone number, and they're supposed to complete your request within 2 1/2 hours. </p>
<p>Who wants to switch? Some analysts estimate that 9 million people will switch carriers <em> <a href="http://www.wirelessweek.com/index.asp?layout=article&amp;articleid=CA319431">on the first day</a></em> of number portability. As the nation's biggest wireless carrier, with 32 million subscribers, Verizon could suffer the most losses. Inevitably, number portability is going to trigger a price war. Consumers who shop around should expect dramatic drops in their wireless bills, possibly down to what's common in Europe: 10 cents a minute, anytime, with no contract. But what's good for consumers is potentially disastrous for Verizon, which has spent billions of dollars building its wireless network—the nation's largest—at a cost it has yet to recoup.</p>
<p><strong>Problem No. 4: Internet telephony. </strong>And finally, there's Skype and its ilk, going straight to the heart of the Verizon empire: the local phone call. By regulatory fiat, Verizon has to let competing companies provide local phone service over Verizon's network infrastructure. So far, few have bothered, because the money in the local-calling business isn't so great. But with broadband Internet, the economics dramatically change in favor of new entrants. </p>
<p>With customers surfing at blistering speeds via their cable modems, the cable companies have backed into a de facto phone system that parallels Verizon's and, like Verizon's, terminates right in the home. On one extreme you have consumers using free applications like Skype (including me: Skype users can ring—or is it Skype?—me at my username, dbennahum). On the other, you have consumers who want to be able to use their plain old telephones (rather than computer-equipped headsets) to make and receive calls over the Internet, and they're willing to pay for the service. Verizon's nemesis, Time Warner Cable, offers unlimited local and long-distance calling over the Internet for $39.95 a month. Some of Howard Dean's presidential campaign offices use <a href="http://www.vonage.com/">Vonage</a>, which offers the same deal for $34.95. (Read <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2075534/">this <em><strong>Slate</strong></em> article</a> for more on Vonage.)</p>
<p>Verizon's stock, understandably, is <a href="http://moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/webquote.dll?ipage=qd&amp;Symbol=VZ">flirting</a> with a 12-month low. The picture is unlikely to get better soon for Verizon stockholders, who have taken a bath this past year. For Verizon customers, it's another story. Whether the phone companies like it or not, the cost of making calls—wired and wireless—is going to collapse in the coming year. And there's little anyone can do to stop it.</p>Tue, 21 Oct 2003 21:26:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/10/you_can_hear_verizon_now.htmlDavid S. Bennahum2003-10-21T21:26:00ZBut can you hear it later?TechnologyVerizon: Dead company walking.2090130David S. BennahumWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2090130falsefalsefalseVerizon: Dead company walking.Verizon: Dead company walking.The Future Is Nowhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/09/the_future_is_now.html
<p>AOL Time Warner's board will meet tomorrow morning to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21766-2003Sep16.html">vote AOL off the island</a>: The company plans to return to its original pre-merger name, Time Warner. Many will gloat over this turn of events. Long accused of being a fuddy-duddy media company that just doesn't get &quot;it&quot; (&quot;it&quot; being the whole media convergence thing), Time Warner will be pilloried in some quarters for its failure to manage its merger with AOL. But while the merger has been less than a glittering success, the name change isn't a sign that Time Warner has failed in its promise to become the media company of tomorrow. </p>
<p>Far from it. Unlike any of its big media rivals, such as ABC/Disney, News Corp, NBC/GE, and CBS/Viacom, Time Warner already resembles what the (successful) media future will look like. AOL's impending demise—that doomed division, clinging to an aging network of dial-up modems, is about to become yet another case study on how technology leaders of one era rarely become leaders of the next—frees Time Warner's other divisions, most notably Time Warner Cable, to keep pioneering the future of media and the Internet.</p>
<p>The latest example of how the company has hurtled ahead of its competitors is its deployment of DVRs, digital video recorders like <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2072037/">TiVo</a>. On Sept. 1, with little fanfare or publicity, Time Warner Cable started delivering a <a href="http://www2.twcnyc.com/index2.cfm?GXHC_gx_session_id_=GXLiteSessionID-2497445156680248265&amp;c=dtv/formdvr">new kind of cable box</a> to Manhattan residents. Known as the Explorer 8000, the box gives Time Warner customers the ability to skip commercials, pause live television, and seamlessly record hours of TV. For less than $10 a month, Manhattanites can now have their own DVR, without the need to buy an expensive TiVo or ReplayTV box. </p>
<p>The Manhattan rollout is the most recent move in 14 months of stealth distribution of the Explorer 8000. The first cable market to be offered these new DVRs was in Rochester, N.Y., in July 2002. Since then, Time Warner Cable has quietly made the service available to 9.3 million households—about 9 percent of the homes in America—and 150,000 of them have signed up. This mirrors the process Time Warner used to deploy its Road Runner broadband Internet service: Start out discreetly, with no visible promotion, build by word of mouth, and then launch a nearly ubiquitous nationwide campaign. Along the way, Road Runner became one of the largest providers of Internet broadband in the country at 2.9 million households. Time Warner admits to using its Road Runner strategy as its road map to promote its DVRs, with one additional wrinkle: The company is considering making the Explorer 8000's technology a standard feature embedded in every cable box, so that customers could turn it on and pay for it without ordering a new box.</p>
<p>It's fitting that Time Warner is leading the charge in the ubiquitous deployment of DVRs, as it, of all large media companies, has the most to gain, and the least to lose, from the technology. Time Warner's major competitors—companies like ABC/Disney, News Corp, NBC/GE, and CBS/ Viacom—derive far more revenue from traditional broadcast television (and therefore from advertising) than Time Warner does. (The majority of TiVo users—the control group for how DVRs will change TV viewing habits—don't watch the commercials in the shows they've recorded.) </p>
<p>Time Warner doesn't own a broadcast network, unless you count the WB. The conglomerate's leading ad-supported TV franchise is CNN, which, as a news network, is fairly immune to the record-and-watch-later phenomenon. Meanwhile, Time Warner owns a series of very successful premium cable TV franchises, most notably HBO and Cinemax. Being able to record <em>The Sopranos</em> and watch it later means that more HBO subscribers will be watching the channel they pay money for, which makes it more likely that they'll renew their subscription. Time Warner is increasingly a company built on the economics of selling access to digital media: Whether it's cable television, high-speed Internet, or premium television, the company's most lucrative businesses involve selling subscriptions, not commercials.</p>
<p>It's been argued that Time Warner, rife with internal rivalries, stymied AOL by discouraging it from innovating. But AOL's internal competitors at Time Warner Cable kept innovating at a rapid clip, as the success of Road Runner (which has also launched a broadband wireless service, embedded within cable boxes for less than $50 a month) demonstrates. If that side could do it, why couldn't AOL? Fortunately for Time Warner, the question is largely academic. Convergence has happened. The future is here. And increasingly it looks like Time Warner.</p>Wed, 17 Sep 2003 23:00:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/09/the_future_is_now.htmlDavid S. Bennahum2003-09-17T23:00:00ZWho needs AOL? Time Warner is already the media company of tomorrow.TechnologyHow Time Warner Cable beat AOL to the future.2088840David S. BennahumWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2088840falsefalsefalseHow Time Warner Cable beat AOL to the future.How Time Warner Cable beat AOL to the future.The World Outside the Webhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/09/the_world_outside_the_web.html
<p> Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel <em>Snow Crash</em> set the tone for the Internet decade. Its irony-enhanced lead character, Hiro Protagonist, alternated between delivering pizza at full throttle through a lethal, sprawl-congested America, and jacking into an equally deadly virtual reality to fight villains and viruses. Sure, eight years earlier William Gibson had launched the geek-samurai genre with his landmark <em>Neuromancer</em>. But unlike depressing, dystopian Gibson, Stephenson turned cyberspace into a joy ride, just months before the World Wide Web took off. He made cyberspace seem like fun. Looking back on those days brings misty-eyed memories: If only the Internet had turned out as cool as Stephenson, and by extension his readers, imagined it.</p>
<p>Stephenson's new book, <em>Quicksilver</em>, is a massive work of historical fiction strong enough to slam the lid shut on the coffin of Internet triumphalism, and hefty enough (at nearly 1,000 pages in hardcover) to hold it down for good. <em>Quicksilver</em> is but the first of a three-book series dubbed <a href="http://www.baroquecycle.com/">the Baroque Cycle</a> due to be published at 6-month intervals over the coming year. Based around the life of Isaac Newton, the series isn't just Stephenson's withdrawal from cyberpunk; it's his proof by exhaustion of information technology's puny place in the universe. It'll have to compete with <em>The Lord of the Rings, </em>Isaac Asimov's <em>Foundation</em> trilogy, and Douglas Hofstadter's <em>G&ouml;del, Escher, Bach </em>for oversize shelf space in young scientists' libraries, but the Baroque Cycle has the potential to be the next literary Nerdapalooza. At a time when bright young geeks are no longer sent forth to get rich quick off the Net, <em>Quicksilver</em> infuses old-school science and engineering with a badly needed dose of swashbuckling adventure, complete with a professor-versus-the-pirates battle at sea. Who knew the Natural Philosophers were so cool?</p>
<p>Part of the book's buzz comes from HarperCollins' clever marketing, which included a <a href="http://www.substream.com/crackingthecode.html">cryptographic puzzle</a>, plus a well-timed review on <a href="http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/22/0515243&amp;mode=nocomment">Slashdot</a> that boosted <em>Quicksilver</em> onto Amazon's Top 10 list just in time for its release today. But the real enthusiasm for the book is based on Stephenson's reputation as not just a clever writer, but a timely one. <em>Snow Crash</em> raised the curtain on the cyberspace decade, while 1999's <em>Cryptonomicon</em> intertwined the tale of an Internet startup with a Greatest Generation flashback, as if the author had foreseen both the Nasdaq bubble and <em>Saving Private Ryan</em>.</p>
<p><em>Quicksilver </em>leaves the present altogether and returns to the time of alchemists and microscope-makers—the forerunners of the biotech and nanotech researchers who are today's IT Geeks. The book makes inspiring, if fallible, heroes out of a group of 17<sup>th</sup>-century mathematicians and scientists who left the Google guys a tough act to follow. Newton established the basics of calculus, invented the reflecting telescope, and began his study of gravity prior to his 25<sup>th</sup> birthday. Well into his 50s, he undertook a 30-year stint overseeing the <a href="http://www.royalmint.com/museum/newton.asp">British Royal Mint</a>. Yet he was just one member of the Royal Society, a group of gentleman knowledge-seekers sponsored in part by King Charles II.</p>
<p>Stephenson's unspoken premise is that 1990s California had nothing on 1660s Europe. &quot;Something happened where a bunch of these people found each other, and they just seemed to do everything within 20 or 30 years,&quot; he told <em>Wired</em> recently. &quot;If you have a scientific or hackerish personality, I can't imagine anything better than being there for one of those Royal Society meetings.&quot; Even their failures were precocious: Bloggers who think <a href="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</a> is a new idea should look into Society founder John Wilkins' 600-page <em>Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language</em>, published in 1668.</p>
<p>The book's heft comes not from the plot, but from Stephenson's endless asides and forays into 17<sup>th</sup>-century math, science, and society, plus the evolution of standardized currency and the stock market. It'll bludgeon some readers into unconsciousness by page 30, but awaken the hunger for detail in others. At first it feels like Stephenson is flaunting how much time he spent at the library, but the lure of the next wisecracking history lesson becomes the most compelling reason to keep going after page 335, when he abruptly drops the Royal Society and begins a new story line, with an entirely different cast in another part of the world.</p>
<p>That's where most readers will hit the wall. Having made it through what is essentially a full-sized novel, it takes more than a deep breath to dive back in for <em>Quicksilver</em>'s two remaining 300-page sections. Will readers hang in there, and then return for two more 1,000-page tomes next year (<em>The Confusion </em>and <em>The System of the World</em>) to learn how it all fits together? More likely, the Baroque Cycle will join <em>G&ouml;del, Escher, Bach</em>—which prompted several college friends to name their computers &quot;Escher&quot; and then get sucked into programming instead of finishing the book—in inspiring a generation of propellerheads who will often quote it but never finish it. It's impossible to say what fields of study they'll apply themselves to, but Stephenson's core message is what matters in these post-bubble days: You haven't missed your chance. Budding geniuses who can no longer feign interest in what happens to Neo and Trinity will gladly immerse themselves in <em>Quicksilver</em>'s mercurial amalgam of science, fiction, and history, at least for the first installment. But jeez, Neal, 3,000 pages? Newton invented calculus in less time than it'll take to read about it.</p>Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:52:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/09/the_world_outside_the_web.htmlPaul Boutin2003-09-17T21:52:00ZNeal Stephenson's new book upends geek chic.TechnologyNeal Stephenson's Quicksilver.2088510Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2088510falsefalsefalseNeal Stephenson's Quicksilver.Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver.An Offer You Can Refusehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/09/an_offer_you_can_refuse.html
<p>If you're one of the 4 million people connected to the KaZaA network at any given time, you were about as likely to be hit by lightning today as by one of the <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/963391.asp">261 lawsuits</a> from the record industry. But even if you got off, you might have reason to worry: The Recording Industry Association of America has at least 1,600 subpoenas in the works to force ISPs to identify file-traders whose IP addresses have been spotted downloading or sharing the copyrighted recordings of RIAA member labels and artists.</p>
<p>The barrage of lawsuits, coupled with an amnesty program for people who haven't yet been busted, is aimed at changing the mindset of Americans who, according to a recent <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=96">study</a> by Pew Research, care less than ever whether they're breaking copyright laws by downloading tunes from the Net. Three years of lawsuits and media campaigns have, if anything, backfired by turning peer-to-peer music sharing into a game of cops and robbers—one where music fans see Hollywood record moguls as the robbers. Judging by online chatter and breaking news reports, today's lawsuits were the first effective attack against song-swappers who previously felt they had safety in numbers.</p>
<p>To those determined to make an end-run around the music biz's lack of attractive online offerings (Apple's <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2082157/">iTunes Music Store</a> is still the best of a weak lot), the lawsuits just mean it's time to abandon KaZaA by moving their game of keep-away to the next playground. KaZaA rose to prominence only after Napster was shut down. Now that RIAA lawyers have proved they can subpoena the names of KaZaA users from their ISPs, expect a mass migration to anonymous, encrypted P2P networks designed specifically to fix the known vulnerabilities in KaZaA. <a href="http://www.earthstation5.com/">Earth Station 5</a> is the most outrageous example. It uses a mesh of proxy servers, encrypted data, and other identity-hiding tricks to keep copyright owners from tracking who's downloading what. To top it all off, the company—which recently issued a press release declaring itself &quot;at war&quot; with the entertainment industry—is headquartered in Palestine.</p>
<p>But what about Americans worried about the prospect of a bank-breaking lawsuit? Should you take the RIAA up on its amnesty offer? Maybe not. The &quot;Clean Slate&quot; program promises that the RIAA won't pursue legal action against P2P pirates who send in a notarized <a href="http://www.riaa.com/pdf/cleanSlateAffidavit.pdf">affidavit</a> declaring that they've wiped all copyright-infringing materials from their disk drives and who vow not to file-share again. But lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco say there are multiple reasons to sit tight for now, rather than rush to sign and deliver what amounts to an admission of guilt. </p>
<p>First, the amnesty offer doesn't apply if the RIAA has already subpoenaed your ISP for your info without your knowledge. The EFF maintains a <a href="http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/riaasubpoenas/">database</a> of known subpoenas, but RIAA lawyers didn't respond to a request for how to definitively tell whether you're on their larger list. More important, the RIAA's offer can't protect you from other potential litigants, which include indie labels or vengeful songwriters. A close read on the <a href="http://www.riaa.com/pdf/cleanSlateDesc.pdf">terms</a> of the deal finds this clause:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Information will not be made public or given to third parties, including individual copyright owners, except if necessary to enforce a participant's violation of the pledges set forth in the Affidavit <strong>or otherwise required by law</strong>. [emphasis added]</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>That last line is the kicker, an EFF lawyer says. There's no guarantee a third party won't successfully subpoena your information from the RIAA, using the same legal procedures the RIAA invoked to get it from your Internet service provider.</p>
<p>The RIAA doesn't make or enforce the laws, it's only the biggest potential litigant. A better offer for file-sharers would be to persuade Congress to pass legislation that offers file-sharers a chance to legally pay for what they download. Copyright holders could collect royalties for music that's traded online in exchange for absolving listeners from needing to personally verify the rights on every song they acquire.</p>
<p>The most obvious method would be the creation of a &quot;blanket compulsory license&quot; for digital media akin to those already used by radio and TV broadcasters. Compulsories, as they're called in the entertainment industry, would work like this: Music fans could download all the music they want for free online, but they'd pay a sort of &quot;download tax&quot; on computers, MP3 players, ISP accounts, and other transport mechanisms for digital music (the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 imposed such a fee on DAT tapes and players). The collected fees would be paid out to musicians and copyright holders based on their real or estimated share of downloads. If that sounds crazy, remember it's also the means by which radio stations and their listeners already share all the music they want, without fear of being sued.</p>Mon, 08 Sep 2003 23:47:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/09/an_offer_you_can_refuse.htmlPaul Boutin2003-09-08T23:47:00ZThe RIAA's amnesty deal may not keep you from being sued.TechnologyShould file-sharers accept amnesty?2088066Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2088066falsefalsefalseShould file-sharers accept amnesty?Should file-sharers accept amnesty?Taped at the BBChttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/08/taped_at_the_bbc.html
<p>For those of us still debating whether to shell out the 40-odd bucks for <em>Fawlty Towers: The Complete Collection</em> on DVD, BBC Director-General Greg Dyke may have settled the matter this weekend. At the end of his <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/dyke_richard_dunn.shtml">speech</a> to an annual TV industry conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, Dyke announced that the Beeb plans to put its enormous TV and radio archives online and to allow anyone to download them—free—for non-commercial use. &quot;Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use,&quot; Dyke said. &quot;We are calling this the BBC Creative Archive.&quot;</p>
<p>Giving away the BBC's content online is an eye-popping proposal, in part because it's such an ambitious project. The BBC produces eight TV channels and 10 radio networks, and it broadcasts the news in 43 languages worldwide. It's been doing television since 1936, and radio since 1922. How much of the Beeb's voluminous output could it really put online?</p>
<p>Dyke and the BBC press office have refused to give out further details, but Beeb staffers had already discussed the project with two of the Net's leading big brains, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and <a href="http://www.archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> founder Brewster Kahle. Lessig chairs the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> project, which has drafted a set of free license agreements for people who want to give away their writing, art, or other works online without having their intellectual property claimed and resold by someone else. In both technical and legal terms, Kahle and Lessig agree: It would be easy for the BBC to put its future programming online, but tougher to pull old tapes from the vault.</p>
<p>Kahle's napkin math on the project goes like this: DVD-quality video requires 3 megabits to 5 megabits of data per second. Over a year, that works out to about 10,000 gigabytes of disk space to store the ouput of one BBC channel, not including reruns and off-air time. That sounds like a lot—10 terabytes—but it's not uncommon for a single array of disks<strong></strong>in a corporate server room to hold hundreds of terabytes at the ready for instant access. Kahle's estimate, based on his 9/11 <a href="http://www.televisionarchive.org/">Television Archive</a> project, is that a rack of low-cost Linux machines could store and serve one channel-year of television, plus a backup copy, on less than $50,000 worth of disks at today's prices. </p>
<p>By the time the BBC gets rolling, you might as well cut that number in half: Disk prices have been falling even faster than CPU speeds are rising, halving every <a href="http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/features/article.php/2248651">nine months</a> by some estimates. If that rate continues, in three years, a year's worth of BBC One would fit on less than $4,000 of disk space. Serving those bits to Web surfers worldwide could be done by expanding the Beeb's existing deal with <a href="http://www.akamai.com/">Akamai</a>, which operates a global network of high-speed Web servers. (MSNBC, which served 85 million video clips during the Iraq war, is another Akamai customer.)</p>
<p>With today's production software, digitizing the Beeb's shows to disk as they air or uploading a copy of each segment separately as it's produced would be easy. But what about the old shows? They can be digitized en masse from tape at an in-house cost of about $15 per hour of material, Kahle estimates. That adds up to around $100,000 per channel per archived year, which suggests it may be better to cherry-pick the best of the Beeb rather than try to upload the whole thing. </p>
<p>The real roadblock to putting the old shows online isn't technical. It's legal. The Creative Archive's license could allow unlimited viewing, editing, and reuse of the digitized BBC programs, which are funded by an annual <a href="http://www.tv-l.co.uk/">TV fee</a> (<a href="http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4444336-103690,00.html">don't call it a tax</a> unless you're ready for a pub brawl) on UK viewers. The archive's license would contain specific language to prohibit resale or any use the Beeb sees as an attempt to cash in on Britain's public property. Here's one of the many thorny questions the project will raise: If Google crawls and indexes the whole thing, does that count?</p>
<p>Whatever the new license's terms, though, it can't just be applied retroactively to existing material. As record companies and book publishers have already learned, the technical work of digitizing and distributing old works is far easier than resolving legal agreements that were crafted in the analog era. Until BBC lawyers go through the exhaustive work of clearing the rights to redistribute the old shows online, we won't know if the Creative Archive will include John Cleese classics or just old News 24 clips. </p>Tue, 26 Aug 2003 23:24:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/08/taped_at_the_bbc.htmlPaul Boutin2003-08-26T23:24:00ZCan the Beeb put its entire archive on the Web?TechnologyCan the BBC put its archive online?2087512Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2087512falsefalsefalseCan the BBC put its archive online?Can the BBC put its archive online?Who Needs Wi-Fi?http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/08/who_needs_wifi.html
<p>Intel's &quot;Unwire&quot; ads hawk the appeal of wireless Internet access from anywhere, but try finding a Wi-Fi hotspot for your <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2080037/">Centrino</a> laptop. Even in the tech-infested Bay Area,<strong></strong>outside of a few hotels and coffee shops, you're usually out of luck. San Francisco Airport's international terminal is draped with Intel's banners, but its only hotspots are outside the security checkpoints. Once you've gotten past the TSA, you're stuck without access until the other end of your flight.</p>
<p>But there's a different wireless service that's quietly sneaking up on Wi-Fi to offer the ubiquitous coverage that's teased in Intel's 30-second spots: Internet access over the same network that your cell phone uses. Think of it as the next generation of dial-up. </p>
<p>Sprint PCS (which <a href="http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cell-phone8.htm">technically isn't cellular</a>), Verizon, and other wireless carriers sell Internet access cards that slide into a PC or PDA and tap into the Internet via the network they use to provide wireless phone service. Sprint's network is based on a wireless standard dubbed CDMA 2000, which some industry watchers say beats the European-style GSM networks now making their way across the United States. One thing's for sure: It'll undo Sprint's reputation for spotty coverage. A recent test drive of Sprint's service from Las Vegas to Silicon Valley demonstrated just how <a href="http://www.sprint.com/pcsbusiness/coverage/index.html">widespread</a> PCS coverage has become, and<strong></strong>just how tightly Wi-Fi addicts are tethered to their sparse, short-range hotspots. A Sprint-equipped laptop worked not only inside the airport, but also inside a car motoring through the Mojave Desert. (Yes, it works while you're rolling down the road, but pull over if you're driving. The dumb driving stunt worse than talking on the phone is reading your e-mail.) Coverage isn't ubiquitous—getting online from <a href="http://www.caohwy.com/b/baker.htm">Baker, Calif.,</a> proved impossible despite the town's cell-phone networks—but it's miles ahead of hunting for a Starbucks with a T-Mobile sticker in the window.</p>
<p>Sprint's range of cards (there are currently four models) fit into the standard dock on the side of most laptops, or the Compact Flash slot on many PDAs. They connect directly to the company's national digital network, which runs up to 144 kilobits per second, three times faster than you can hope for from an old-fashioned dial-up connection. Sprint claims average connection speeds are closer to 50 to 70 Kbps, but I was able to get it up to 100 a couple of times. That makes the service slow for Web surfing but plenty fast for keeping up on e-mail, instant messages, and news headlines (via an <a href="http://radio.userland.com/whatIsANewsAggregator">aggregator</a>). Downloading MapQuest pages can take a minute, but it saves you the embarrassment of rolling down the window to ask for directions.</p>
<p>There are two reasons that cellular Net access hasn't caught on yet: Price and hassle. The cards cost more than $150 each, and Sprint's service adds at least $40 a month. That's a worthwhile expense for a traveling sales rep, but a lot to swallow for a home consumer with an Internet addiction. On top of that, installing and configuring the cards can be an aggravation, with the confusing error messages that come with any PC hardware not already built into the box. One of our testers, a professional software engineer, blew part of his workday upgrading device drivers on his two laptops after getting an error message that said, &quot;The PCS Connection Card is not present or is already in use,&quot; when the card was clearly in its slot and idle. </p>
<p>Sprint markets their Internet cards as a business productivity tool, rather than a consumer product like a cell phone, although anyone can buy one. That's probably smart: Most computer users won't like the service as long as it involves add-on cards and baffling software installs. So, don't be surprised if the next generation of Centrino laptops bundles similar hardware<strong></strong>along with Wi-Fi to provide ubiquitous wireless access straight out of the box. But until Intel's products catch up with their ads, these cards are the real way to unwire your life.</p>
<p><em>Webhead thanks Cliff Skolnick of <a href="http://www.ironsystems.com/">Iron Systems</a> and Peter Sicilia of <a href="http://www.addamark.com/">Addamark Technologies</a>.</em></p>Fri, 22 Aug 2003 19:18:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/08/who_needs_wifi.htmlPaul Boutin2003-08-22T19:18:00ZDial-up Internet access goes wireless.TechnologyDial-up Internet access goes wireless.2087308Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2087308falsefalsefalseDial-up Internet access goes wireless.Dial-up Internet access goes wireless.Make Money Fast!!!!http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/08/make_money_fast.html
<p>If you e-mail me in response to this article, chances are you won't hear back. This is not because I'm too lazy to reply. Well, I'm not <em>always </em>too lazy to reply. Mainly it's because I get so much spam these days that survival means fast-deleting anything that looks like junk, which sometimes includes reader e-mail. Like a lot of people, I have passed a threshold in the last year or so: Spam has gone from one of life's little nuisances to <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2074042/">a threat to the usefulness of e-mail</a>.</p>
<p>Technologically, no quick fix is in sight. But it's helpful to think about what sort of fix the technologists should be hunting for. The answer, I think, is this: I should have property rights to my e-mail inbox, and I should be able to charge you for admission.</p>
<p>The spam problem is a new instance of a very old and familiar dilemma, which economists call the tragedy of the commons. When any resource is both valuable and freely available, people will tend to overuse it. Moreover, everyone anticipates that everyone else will overuse it, so everyone tries all the harder to get while the getting is good. The result is a run on the resource. The tragedy is that everyone's least-favored outcome—the depletion or exhaustion of the resource—is assured.</p>
<p>Centuries of theory and practice have discovered two effective remedies. One is to appoint a conservator with the unique power to mete out the resource: say, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The other is to create property rights to the resource and allow a market to develop. What people own, they conserve.</p>
<p>In the case of e-mail, the valuable resource at issue is my attention, and the problem is that access to it is essentially free. People who really want to talk to me need to make no more effort than people who merely want to waste my time. The result is a run on my attention. My inbox becomes less like a mailbox and more like a Dumpster, through which I must sift to find items of interest.</p>
<p>Some people have proposed that the market-based solution to spam is to levy a public fee or tax for sending e-mail. In effect, the government would become postmaster general of cyberspace. But Webheads are understandably reluctant to make the government the conservator of e-mail. Government oversight could open the Internet to all kinds of regulation and tempt politicians to milk it for revenues. A bigger objection is that the government is notoriously bad at setting prices. Just imagine the equivalent of a Postal Rate Commission for e-mail. In fact, by definition no one-size-fits-all price could possibly be right, because we all place a different value on our attention. Some people <em>like </em>spam.</p>
<p>Suppose instead that we gave me<em></em>legally enforceable conservatorship of my mailbox. Then I could sue you for trespassing if you sent e-mails after I told you to stay out. This is not as farfetched as it may sound: Courts and legal scholars are already developing a nascent concept of cyber-trespass. Suing, however, would be massively inefficient, best left as a remedy of last resort. As for the remedy of first resort, I would charge you. Are you a stranger who wants to get into my e-mail inbox? Pay me.</p>
<p>But isn't the great benefit of e-mail that it's free? Not exactly: Spam filters, missed messages, clogged mailboxes, and server overload, to say nothing of odious come-ons, are existing costs for using e-mail, and fast-rising ones. The whole problem is that e-mail is expensive, and the wrong people are paying for it.</p>
<p>The solution is to make spammers pay their targets, instead of forcing the targets to pay for spam. Everyone could charge a different entrance fee for access to his or her inbox. If I like hearing about cheap Viagra, I could charge nothing or almost nothing. The higher my price per e-mail, the less spam I would receive—and a larger portion of the spam that I did get would be targeted, rather than random, so it might actually be interesting. If I set a very high price, I would receive no spam at all. By experimenting, I could find a price that suited me, and I could always adjust it to suit my needs. (Try that with the post office.) Friends and listservs and other &quot;whitelisted&quot; designees, of course, wouldn't have to pay me at all.</p>
<p>Moreover, the system could be self-financing. Some portion of what I charge per incoming e-mail could be siphoned off to pay administrative costs. Furthermore, most people, and probably even most reputable companies, send and receive e-mail in roughly equal quantities. So, after administrative expenses, the costs would net out—except for people who do a lot of sending but not much receiving, namely spammers.</p>
<p>I vetted&nbsp;this idea with a number of cyber-law specialists, and they raised some thorny technical issues, such as who would pay for bounce-backs. There is also the question of how to conduct billions of transactions without gumming up the system. One possible answer is proposed by an economist named David Friedman: <a href="http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&amp;CID=1051-080802A">reusable cyber-stamps</a>. When I receive e-mail, I would collect the required cyber-postage—assuming, of course, you had attached enough. Unlike conventional stamps, however, these would be reusable. I would turn around and send them out again with my own e-mail. </p>
<p>The pay-me approach is not actually as novel as it may sound. It's a variant of the so-called &quot;digital handshake,&quot; but it replaces the handshake with a digital negotiation. In the handshake concept, unsolicited e-mail is answered with a request for a specific response. Only if the right answer is given is the mail delivered. The pay-me approach essentially replaces the question, &quot;Who are you to deserve my attention?&quot; with the question, &quot;How much will you pay for my attention?&quot; My software could be programmed to ask strangers for, say, 1 cent. Your software could be programmed to offer a maximum of, say, half a cent, or 1 cent, or 5 cents. If my demand was under your limit, you would pay and your mail would be delivered. If not, no deal.</p>
<p>If all that sounds hairy, remember that the U.S. financial system settles hundreds of millions of transactions worth something like $3 trillion—more than a quarter of the annual GDP—<em>every day</em>, and no one thinks a thing of it. Once high-volume transactions become routine, the expense of processing them drops to near-triviality. Remember, also, that today's system is anything but free. You are already paying for it, and the costs are going only one way.</p>
<p>So if you want to e-mail me, pay up. That, I guarantee, will get my attention.</p>Mon, 11 Aug 2003 19:56:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/08/make_money_fast.htmlJonathan Rauch2003-08-11T19:56:00ZIf you owned your inbox, spammers would pay to get inside.TechnologyWhy you should get paid for receiving e-mail.2086880Jonathan RauchWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2086880falsefalsefalseWhy you should get paid for receiving e-mail.Why you should get paid for receiving e-mail.Hack the Votehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/07/hack_the_vote.html
<p> After the hanging-chad fiasco of the 2000 presidential election, Congress funded a nationwide drive to replace punch-card ballots and lever-operated voting machines in time for November 2004. The <a href="http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm">Help America Vote Act</a> of 2002, or HAVA, authorized $3.9 billion over three years to help state and local governments upgrade their election equipment. The only replacements being considered seriously are electronic voting booths: stand-alone kiosks for which voters are given an encrypted smartcard that identifies them to the computer and lets them vote exactly once. But a <a href="http://www.avirubin.com/vote.pdf">report</a> released last week by the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University says the touch-screen machines are Swiss cheese—full of holes—for hackers. &quot;Common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected,&quot; the report claims. It's based on an analysis of the software source code for voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems, a division of a company that makes automated teller machines. Someone at Diebold accidentally placed the code on a publicly accessible Internet server in January, resulting in its dissemination around the Net.</p>
<p>Diebold boasts only 33,000 machines in use nationwide, and Omaha, Neb.-based <a href="http://www.essvote.com/">Election Systems &amp; Software</a>, which claims to count 56 percent of America's vote, has installed a mere 30,000 touch-screen machines in 15 different states. But the state of Maryland, which bought 5,000 of Diebold's machines last year, just awarded Diebold a contract to replace the rest of the state's booths with 11,000 more touch-screen units. That's probably why Baltimore-based JHU's report sounds like it's lunging for the emergency brake. &quot;Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards,&quot; it thunders on page one. The report claims the code is riddled with &quot;unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes&quot; (Ack! A geek's worst insult!) before spelling out a scenario in which a middling hacker steals the vote by stamping out fake voter smartcards using a $100 desktop printer.</p>
<p>Are there bugs in Diebold's code? Of course there are, same as with any program longer than &quot;Hello, world.&quot; But instead of 'fessing up, Diebold has issued one <a href="http://www.diebold.com/whatsnews/default.htm">press release</a> after another trying to discredit the Johns Hopkins report. Too bad the company didn't decide to go with the flow instead, by claiming it put the source code on the Internet on purpose. Open-sourcing its software was the smartest mistake Diebold could have made. It's the only way security experts (real or self-imagined) will ever take the company seriously. The security track record of open-source programs such as the Linux kernel and the Apache Web server suggests that an all-hands review would improve Diebold's product. And unlike most software products, there's little business risk. Unlike pirated music CDs, bootleg voting booths based on Diebold's copyrighted code would be a tough sell to local governments, either in the United States or in the 178 other member nations of the <a href="http://www.wipo.org/members/members/">World Intellectual Property Organization</a>.</p>
<p>More important, open-sourcing the voting machines would reduce some people's nagging fear that the booths are rigged. Even if there were no bugs at all in the code, the installation of hundreds of thousands of new, all-electronic voting machines just in time for President Bush's next election is already high-octane fuel for conspiracy theorists. News stories on the Diebold flap have ignored the original source of the claims: Bev Harris, a Renton, Wash., publicist and fast-talking progressive activist. The Johns Hopkins study was based on the code Harris found, but by her own admission she is neither an impartial source nor a particularly technical one. Harris claims she found Diebold's source code online while obsessively Googling for information about the company's possible connections to the Bush administration. That's probably why major newspapers, including the <em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html">New York Times</a></em>, that have picked up on her discovery have run it without mentioning her. Meanwhile, though, Harris is drawing lots of online links to her black-helicopter <a href="http://scoop.co.nz/mason/features/?s=usacoup">claims</a>, which boil down to: Diebold's machines are designed with back doors into which GOP operatives can download additional &quot;votes.&quot; None have been found, but good luck pointing that out the day after the election.</p>
<p>The two most popular scenarios for Hack the Vote '04 are either a <a href="http://www.kevinmitnick.com/">Kevin Mitnick</a>-style cyberpunk tapping into the machines remotely, or Cheney board-member cronies who order back doors built into the software. Hollywood-style plots like these are about as likely as they sound. Instead, Stanford University computer science professor David Dill, who has been campaigning for better voting machines, says the most likely hack would be an inside job carried out by an accomplished, partisan hacker who lands a trusted job at Diebold, ES&amp;S, or one of the election offices. &quot;Imagine a programmer, system administrator, or even a janitor who gets access to the code,&quot; Dill says.</p>
<p>Dill points out that most successful computer crimes are pulled off by insiders. It's the standard M.O. for identity theft: The thief finagles a job at a financial firm, close to the big database of customer accounts, and walks out the door with a copied disk. Likewise, voting machines could be tampered with by insiders who turn out to be party agents, or even a lone gunman with the political drive to match his coding skills—say, a Unix guru who thinks Nader just needs a little help to defeat those corporate campaign contributions.</p>
<p>The only sure check against an outlaw wacko programmer is an army of wacko programmers poring over every line of his work. There are also ways to verify that the booths themselves aren't running tampered code. Instead of looking for Diebold's ties to Dick Cheney, we should be watching that quiet new repairman.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it's unlikely that any of the voting-machine vendors will go the open-source route. Proprietary code is a given in most corporate cultures, and Jim Barksdale's conversion to open source at Netscape five years ago didn't exactly set a great example of successful results. But there's another feature that should be added to the electronic machines that already record about 20 percent of America's votes: an old-fashioned paper trail. Dill calls it a &quot;<a href="http://www.verifiedvoting.org/">voter verifiable audit trail</a>,&quot; which means that before you leave the booth, you the voter get a printout of what the machine thinks your votes are, for your review. If you agree with the printout, you drop it into a sealed box where it can be used for recounts. Boxes full of paper are much harder to manipulate than electronic tallies. Without a paper copy of your vote stored as a backup, there's no way to prove whether electronic vote totals were tampered with.</p>
<p>Adding a ballot-printing option to electronic machines should be an easy fix, but unless Congress mandates that elections have a paper trail, don't expect local governments to line up behind the idea. ES&amp;S claims it will be able to add a printer to existing machines for $500 each—a 10 percent markup. And a Diebold spokesman told me, &quot;While Diebold is certainly capable of producing receipt printers, we currently have no plans to manufacture receipt printers primarily because our customers haven't requested it.&quot; HAVA passed without requiring a voter-verified audit trail, and a bill to amend it hasn't gone far in the House. Unless that changes, if you don't like next November's election results, at least you'll be able to blame the computer.</p>Thu, 31 Jul 2003 22:31:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/07/hack_the_vote.htmlPaul Boutin2003-07-31T22:31:00ZHow to stop someone from stealing the 2004 election.TechnologyCould a hacker steal the 2004 election?2086455Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2086455falsefalsefalseCould a hacker steal the 2004 election?Could a hacker steal the 2004 election?Digging for Googleholeshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/07/digging_for_googleholes.html
<p> The arrival of <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> five years ago served as a kind of upgrade for the entire Web. Searching for information went from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence. If it was online somewhere, Google and its ingenious <a href="http://www.google.com/technology/">PageRank</a> system would find what you were looking for—and more often than not, the information would arrive in Google's top 10 results.</p>
<p>But the oracle—recently described as &quot;a little bit like God&quot; in the <em>New York Times</em>—is not perfect. Certain types of requests foil the Google search system or produce results that frustrate more than satisfy. These are systemic problems, not isolated ones; you can reproduce them again and again. The algorithms that Google's search engine relies on have been brilliantly optimized for most types of information requests, but sometimes that optimization backfires. That's when you find yourself in a Googlehole.</p>
<p><strong>Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time.</strong> If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for &quot;<a href="http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;q=flowers">flowers</a>,&quot; and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists. If you're doing research on tulips, or want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for.</p>
<p>The same goes for searching for specific products: Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you'll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn't appear in an online catalog.</p>
<p>I suspect this emphasis is due to the convention of linking to an online store when mentioning a product, whether it's a book, CD, or outdoor grill. In addition, a number of sites—such as <a href="http://www.dealtime.com/">DealTime</a>—track the latest prices and availability of thousands of items at online stores, which creates even more product links in Google's database. Because PageRank assumes that pages that attract a lot of links are more relevant than pages without links, these most-linked-to product pages bubble up to the top.</p>
<p>Google is replicating one of the problems experienced by some of the big portals—sites like Lycos and Infoseek—during the boom years. They sold so much real estate on their pages to online stores and other advertisers that their results became less reliable, which gave Google its opening in the first place. Now the same thing is happening again, only it's happening organically, without Google manipulating the integrity of its search engine.</p>
<p><strong>Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. </strong>Search for &quot;<a href="http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;q=apple">apple</a>&quot; on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer—and it's a <a href="http://www.ktca.org/newtons/">page promoting a public TV show</a> called <em>Newton's Apple</em>. After that it's all Mac-related links until <a href="http://www.fiona-apple.com/">Fiona Apple's home page</a>. You have to sift through 50 results before you reach a link that deals with apples that grow on trees: the home page for the <a href="http://www.bestapples.com/">Washington State Apple Growers Association</a>. To a certain extent, this probably reflects the interest of people searching as well as those linking, but is the world really that much more interested in Apple Computer than in old-fashioned apples?</p>
<p>At this stage in the Web's development, people who create a lot of links—most notably the blogging community—tend to be more technologically inclined than the general population, and thus more likely to link to Apple Computer than something like the Washington State Apple Growers Association. (This process is sometimes known as &quot;<a href="http://www.searchenginedictionary.com/g.shtml#googlewashing">googlewashing</a>,&quot; where one group of prolific linkers can alter the online associations with a given word or phrase.) But there's another factor here, which is that categories that don't have central, well-known sites devoted to them will fare poorly when they share a keyword with other categories. Maybe there are thousands of pages that deal with apples, but only one Apple Computer or Fiona Apple home page. People interested in growing or eating apples will distribute those links more widely across those thousands of pages, while Mac or Fiona fans will consolidate around fewer pages, driving them higher in Google's rankings.</p>
<p><strong>Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning.</strong> Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you're doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books. Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.</p>
<p>There's a parallel development in Google's treatment of Web sites that restrict access to their archives. The <em>New York Times</em> may be an authority in the world of opinion, but its closed archives mean that its articles rarely rank highly in Google results, if they appear at all. Search for &quot;Augusta National,&quot; Howell Raines' pet obsession from this year, and not a single page from the <em>Times</em> site appears in the top 50 results. Uber-blogger <a href="http://www.scripting.com/">Dave Winer</a> <a href="http://www.longbets.org/2">bet</a> the CEO of the New York Times Digital last year that in 2007 bloggers will rank higher than the <em>Times</em> in Google searches. As Winer now <a href="http://davenet.userland.com/2003/05/18/ifYouWantToBeInGoogleYouGottaBeOnTheWeb">puts it</a>: &quot;If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web.&quot;</p>
<p>You can't really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure. But the existence of Googleholes suggests an important caveat to the Google-as-oracle rhetoric: Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the &quot;group mind,&quot; but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links. A group mind decides that Apple Computer is more relevant than the apples that you eat, but that group doesn't speak for everybody.</p>
<p>We're wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It's closer to a collectively authored op-ed page—filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion—than an encyclopedia. It's still the connected world's most dazzling place to visit, a perfect condensation of the Web's wider anarchy. Just don't call it an oracle.</p>Wed, 16 Jul 2003 15:39:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/07/digging_for_googleholes.htmlSteven Johnson2003-07-16T15:39:00ZGoogle may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.TechnologyGoogle, the god that failed?2085668Steven JohnsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2085668falsefalsefalseGoogle, the god that failed?Google, the god that failed?Flipping the Switchhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/06/flipping_the_switch.html
<p> In the latest of his legendary keynote stage shows, Steve Jobs kicked off Apple's <a href="http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/">Worldwide Developers Conference</a> this morning in San Francisco by showing off the company's speedy new aluminum <a href="http://www.apple.com/powermac">G5</a> desktop Mac. But while listing the new machine's impressive specs, Jobs left out a related, eye-popping statistic: <em>Business Week</em> columnist Alex Salkever <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2003/tc20030618_7983_tc056.htm">dropped the bomb</a> last week that next year, &quot;Linux should pass Apple in market share for desktop operating systems on computers.&quot;</p>
<p>Say what? A few calls to industry analysts confirmed that they've come to the same conclusion as Salkever: Steve's new babies have been born into third place behind both Windows and Linux, which had been dubbed a desktop <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/linux.html">flop</a> just two years ago.</p>
<p>The projected sales figures mark a turning point: The days when a new Mac on your desk was considered the stylish geek's protest against Microsoft's ubiquitous software (unless you could afford a $10,000 Sun workstation) have ended. There's a new way to Think Different in town. Linux was Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds' response to Sun's pricing, but many more techies saw it as the ultimate weapon for their all-out software jihad against Microsoft (which, of course, owns <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>). But like another holy war, the Linux-Microsoft fight has resulted mostly in collateral damage. Instead of wiping out Windows, Linux evangelists have driven one after another of Microsoft's competitors out of the operating system business. IBM, DEC, SCO, and finally Sun have <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/40mcnealy.html">lost</a> the non-Windows portion of the server market to Linux, and no wonder: Linux is basically a better version of their Unix products, for free. The Penguinheads should have seen it coming. Compared to Microsoft's server wares, Linux is an alternative worth considering, but against a $3,000 Unix license, it's a no-brainer. </p>
<p>Now, with Linux's emergence as an acceptable alternative for the consumer desktop, Apple is standing in position to become its next friendly-fire casualty. By blending gorgeous design with user-friendly software, Apple lets you buy your way out of the Microsoft world—aided by a hand-holding deal with Microsoft to help the two brands work well together. (On that note, Apple released a Windows configuration tool for its AirPort Extreme wireless network base station last week, eliminating one step in <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s recent &quot;<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2084046/">Wi-Fi for Dummies</a>&quot; article.) But it comes at a hefty premium: Apple's new desktop models start at $1,999. </p>
<p>Linux takes the low road, price-wise. It's not pretty, but it's free, plus it's lean and fast enough to run on a yellowed old PC from the storage room if you're willing to spend a few hours getting the software installed and running. Or, for $248, you can buy a brand new, ready-to-use Linux desktop computer from <a href="http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?cat=106562&amp;path=0:3944:3951:41937:86796:106562">Wal-mart.com</a>. The bargain-basement price is possible because Torvalds and other Linux programmers don't demand license fees. They either work on their software for free outside their day jobs, or they've convinced their employers to let them donate their work. As a brand, Linux is anti-corporate and anti-consumerist, but skip the neo-Marxist <a href="http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/">gift economy</a> theories that have sprung up around Torvalds. He's more like the Crazy Eddie of software: His prices are insaaane! Linux is fast, cheap, and reliable, in defiance of the old engineer's adage that you can only have two out of three. </p>
<p>Sure, the new Mac operating system (code named <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/">Panther</a>) is pretty slick—it's also based on Unix, and partially open-sourced. And Jobs has made it clear he doesn't compete on price, but on the more complex curve of price/performance, which includes factors such as ease of use, customer support, and interoperability with Microsoft—areas where Apple is way ahead of Linux. But with technology budgets frozen or slashed in most offices and homes, it's getting harder to compete with free—unless you're Microsoft. Every field in software seems to thin out to Microsoft and Someone Else. Usually, it's Microsoft and Second Place, but this year's game console wars illustrate the point, too: The entry of Microsoft's Xbox hasn't hurt first-place PlayStation 2. Instead, it bumped second-place Nintendo to third.</p>
<p>As the <a href="http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/wars.html">Unix wars</a> proved, the software biz doesn't have time for No. 3. The software developers in town for Apple's conference today are mostly Mac-only coders, but their employers want to reach as broad an audience as possible, and as the saying in the industry goes, choose two. Apple still has software applications not available on Linux—such as Quark for publishing, or Photoshop for graphics—but if Salkever's analyst buddies step forth and pronounce Linux the No. 2 platform, software companies will re-evaluate their commitments. No doubt the graphic designers and multimedia artists who have remained loyal to Macs will continue to buy them, but to grow Apple needs more <a href="http://www.apple.com/switch">Switchers</a> to abandon Windows—and not for Linux. </p>
<p>Is the new Mac the fastest personal computer ever? Maybe, but that was Sun's line, too. I'd love to do my work on a shiny new G5, but $248 is a lot closer to a free-lancer's purchasing power these days. Unless Jobs unveils a better, faster economy at his next keynote, my next desktop computer will come from Wal-Mart.</p>Mon, 23 Jun 2003 21:04:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/06/flipping_the_switch.htmlPaul Boutin2003-06-23T21:04:00ZLinux's new popularity may hurt Apple more than Microsoft.TechnologyWill Linux kill Apple?2084727Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2084727falsefalsefalseWill Linux kill Apple?Will Linux kill Apple?Wi-Fi for Dummieshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/06/wifi_for_dummies.html
<p>Wireless networking is the best thing to happen to the Internet since the browser, but whoever came up with it should have tested it at home first. The current crop of 802.11 gear (colloquially known as &quot;Wi-Fi,&quot; even when that's not technically correct) can reach through a room or two, but many homeowners find it's not enough to cover the entire house and yard. Wi-Fi uses a microwave radio signal to reach through walls, floors, and ceilings, just like a cordless phone. But these obstacles also dampen the signal just as they do with the phone. The advertised range for Wi-Fi is 150 feet indoors and 300 feet outdoors, but in real life it often fails to reach from the kitchen to the living room, or upstairs to the bedroom.</p>
<p>Determined to exercise my inalienable right as an American to surf the Web from the swimming pool, I enlisted a Wi-Fi engineer who also owns a sprawling suburban home to make my system work. Our mission: Blanket the entire property with Wi-Fi, using only off-the-shelf consumer hardware and without running more cables. That meant setting up multiple Wi-Fi bases (&quot;access points,&quot; as they're called) linked back to a single DSL line. Furthermore, we decided our access points all had to be the same model of hardware, rather than mixing one kind of central base station with different satellite units as we had seen some techie friends do. As a final restriction, our chosen gear had to be mass-market consumer hardware, not something sold to the &quot;enterprise&quot; niche of office IT professionals. That way, we could send homeowners to the mall with only one model of&nbsp;gadget to purchase, one for which they could find ample customer support. They could start with one, then keep adding more of them until they covered the whole house.</p>
<p>The only product that met our needs was Apple's <a href="http://www.apple.com/airport/">AirPort Extreme</a> base station. At $199 for the entry-level model, it's a bit pricier than most other home Wi-Fi bases, but it has all the right stuff for our project: It's sold to the home consumer market. It's designed to serve as home firewall and router as well as wireless access point. Most important, it's the only home consumer base that flaunts its support for the Wireless Distribution System, which knits multiple access points together to act as a single network. An AirPort base plugged into the DSL or cable modem can bridge to up to four additional AirPorts, nearly doubling the network's wireless reach in four directions at once. Even better, the method lets you put an AirPort right in the room with you, rather than trying to beam the connection through a wall. This approach vastly reduces the amount of squirming in your seat required before your laptop will pick up enough signal from the other room.</p>
<p>There's only one major caveat on the AirPort: You'll need a Mac to configure it. Since you'll only need to do this once, though, it's not a big problem. Only a small percentage of us own an Apple computer, but we all know someone who does and never stops <a href="http://joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/433.html">reminding us</a>. Not only will your Mac Buddy come over and set up your AirPorts, he'll be hurt if you don't let him. Go ahead, ask him and see. [<em>Update, June 23, 2003</em>: Apple now offers free software to configure the AirPort Extreme from a Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer.&nbsp;Download it <a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120226">here</a>.]</p>
<p>To start, buy just one AirPort Extreme base, the $249 version that includes an antenna connector and a phone jack for dialup service in the event your broadband line ever goes out of service. You may never need an antenna, but it's better to have the option. Set the AirPort up as close to the center of the house as possible, because wireless signal strength fades geometrically with distance. At twice as far away from the base, you'll get only one-fourth the power. Position the base a few feet off the floor and away from metal cabinets or packed closets that might get in the way. Follow the instructions for configuring the AirPort (or let Mac Boy do it for you), then carry your laptop around the house to anywhere you can sit, as well as anywhere you stand while doing housework. It's a sure bet that at some point, you'll want to get online from there.</p>
<p> If the AirPort doesn't reach everywhere you need it to, it's time to start filling in the dead zones with additional AirPorts. The $199 version without antenna and phone jacks will do fine. Apple has a <a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107454">knowledge base</a> entry that makes bridging multiple units <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2084048">easy</a>.</p>
<p>Be sure to follow the instructions slowly and type in configuration numbers carefully. Unlike most computer setup operations, misconfiguring a wireless base can have dire consequences—including disabling all your wireless hardware. Jazzed on too much caffeine, we did this to ourselves and had to poke at the AirPorts' factory reset buttons with a paper clip to start over from scratch.</p>
<p>The most important factor in Wi-Fi is location. Distance saps wireless strength, and so do most construction materials. Keep your base stations away from solid walls and doors, as well as any metal objects or computer equipment. Put them near windows or hollow walls instead. Our test home's lightweight California stucco walls turned out to have impenetrable wire mesh inside them. To reach outside, we placed the unit in sight of a window facing the pool. Most home window glass is transparent to microwaves as well as light, so a window is better than a wall or a door.</p>
<p>We ended up with three AirPorts: One in the computer room plugged in to the DSL line, another mounted to the wall in the furnace closet (but placed above the heater for clearance), and a third in the rec room atop a PlayStation 2.</p>
<p>If you're fortunate enough to live somewhere bigger, additional bases on upper and lower floors will stretch your network's range. Apple sells two different models of antenna. The first costs $99 and flattens the AirPort's spherical coverage pattern into a circular disk that reaches further horizontally, at the expense of vertical coverage to floors above or below. The other, a larger $149 device, focuses the signal into a flat beam for even longer runs across the yard to the guest house. Before you buy more hardware, though, it's always worth moving the base station to a different spot, rotating it, or standing it on its side. The results may defy common sense, but go with what works.</p>
<p>Under our plan, blanketing your estate in Wi-Fi will cost at least $249 and could run to a thousand bucks or more for a castle in the Hamptons. But as with your first computer or first Internet connection, you'll get a return on investment that can't be counted in the household budget. The first time you dispose of a tedious backlog of e-mail while kicking back in your favorite lawn chair, you'll know instantly your new network is worth every penny.</p>
<p><em>Webhead thanks Cliff Skolnick of <a href="http://www.ironsystems.com/">Iron Systems</a>.</em></p>Mon, 09 Jun 2003 14:56:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/06/wifi_for_dummies.htmlPaul Boutin2003-06-09T14:56:00ZYou want a home wireless network, but you're afraid it won't work. Here's how to do it right.TechnologyWi-Fi for dummies.2084046Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2084046falsefalsefalseWi-Fi for dummies.Wi-Fi for dummies.Putting the World Into the Wide Webhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/05/putting_the_world_into_the_wide_web.html
<p>Technology pundits seem to have one thing in common: They hate to travel. As the Internet and other global networks became faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous, the most respected seers forecast a world where we would no longer need to get out of the house. &quot;People will soon be saved the expense, tedium, and energy waste of conventional travel,&quot; George Gilder prophesied in his 1989 book <em> <a href="http://www.duke.edu/~mccann/gild-tel.htm">Microcosm</a></em>. Frances Cairncross, author of 1997's <em> <a href="http://www.deathofdistance.com/interview.html">The Death of Distance</a></em>, has said that &quot;The most important consequence is going to be the way we think of geography. … It's more important for us to know what time zone somebody lives in than physically where they are on the planet.&quot; But the death of distance turned out to have an equal and opposite reaction: a new hyper-awareness of location.</p>
<p>Wi-Fi, this year's buzz technology, is the best example in years of how a tool meant to obliterate a restriction on our lives—location, in this case—can also sharpen our sensitivity to it. Wi-Fi users are the most location-obsessed people on Earth. Do I know the direction and distance to my hotspot this second? All too well—I'm sitting sideways in my chair for better bandwidth.</p>
<p>A new product called <a href="http://www.trepia.com/">Trepia</a> (pronounced with a short e, as in &quot;intrepid&quot;) that launched a few months ago takes advantage of this rebirth of distance. Connect to a Wi-Fi network, and Trepia's servers figure out what other users are also plugged into your little section of the planet. The program displays a buddy list of friends and strangers who are nearby and online, with a photo and profile of each. You can then message one another if you want. Basically, it's an AOL Instant Messenger that knows where you are. </p>
<p>The company's <a href="http://www.trepia.com/scenarios/">suggested uses</a> for its product are lacquered with a thin veneer of productivity: Finding friends at the airport, meeting like minds at a conference, identifying other students working on the same homework assignment. But who are they kidding? Trepia has built the latest, greatest Internet dating service. &quot;Aren't you in my psych class?&quot; &quot;Are you here for MacWorld, too?&quot; Focusing on Wi-Fi users makes the conversation flow more easily, since the technology's early adopters feel a sense of bond similar to that among smokers huddled on a loading dock. Surfing in public gets me chatted up in Manhattan as reliably as walking a small, excitable dog. &quot;How's the bandwidth?&quot; is the pickup line of a new generation.</p>
<p>Previous ideas for location-based services lacked zing because they focused on routing consumers to nearby products and services: <a href="http://www.go2online.com/">mobile yellow pages</a> that route you to the nearest Pizza Hut, or phones that ring when you walk past a shoe sale. But that's like saying in 1993 that the World Wide Web will blow your mind because of its ad banners. Trepia founder Jawed Karim understands that what people really want is to connect to other people.</p>
<p>The only problem with Trepia is that the company doesn't have many users at this point. There's nothing more disappointing than a buddy list with no buddies on it. In order to test it, I had to persuade nearby strangers to install it. To reach critical mass, Karim expanded the latest version to include people on any kind of Internet connection, not just Wi-Fi. You have to wonder if Karim expects to convert millions of users from AIM, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, though, or if he's really just hoping for a bidding war for his technology. </p>
<p>Either way, the results will be fascinating to watch. Part of the excitement of test-driving Trepia was the uncertainty of what would happen when I connected with complete strangers who knew who I was and where I was sitting. Meeting fellow Wi-Fi enthusiasts beat the heck out of talking to dog owners or bumming a cigarette as an introduction. Maybe this will end the stereotype that Internet addicts ignore their families and friends. Trepia gave me an excuse to finally meet my neighbors.</p>Fri, 30 May 2003 14:29:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/05/putting_the_world_into_the_wide_web.htmlPaul Boutin2003-05-30T14:29:00ZAn instant messenger that knows where you are.TechnologyPutting the World into the Wide Web.2083733Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2083733falsefalsefalsePutting the World into the Wide Web.Putting the World into the Wide Web.Escape From SimCityhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/05/escape_from_simcity.html
<p> Even if you've never touched a computer game, you've probably heard about Will Wright's genre-busting hits from friends who got sucked into them. SimCity (1989) put players in charge of urban planning for a computer-simulated metropolis that fought their every move (welcome to New York, Mr. Bloomberg). Wright's 1999 follow-up, the Sims<em>, </em> moved the action to a <em>Simpsons</em>-style suburb. Players created dream kitchens and rumpus rooms for characters less from the real world than <em>The Real World</em>. Would Kelly and Brad hit it off at the pool party, or would Krystal intercept him at the punch bowl? The game sold four million copies in its first year, and custom &quot;skins&quot; for Sims characters are an online <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22sims+skins%22&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8">cottage industry</a>.</p>
<p>But Wright's latest rollout, the <a href="http://thesimsonline.ea.com/">Sims Online</a>, is a giant flop, the gaming industry's <em>Hudson Hawk</em>. The idea seemed like a winner: Take the online, multi-player fantasy worlds of Everquest<em></em>and Ultima Online, and replace the swords and sorcery with an ironic Sims suburbia. Instead of slaying dragons to survive, human players logged in from all over would band together to make pizza. But six months after its release, Sims Online has just 97,000 active players, far short of the millions Wright's backers had forecast. Writing in <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>,<strong><em></em></strong>Steven Johnson nailed the game's fatal flaw: the &quot;<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2073786/">bizarre, high-school-like quality</a>&quot; of its compulsory social interactions. I lost at high school once already; why would I want to play again?</p>
<p> Enter <a href="http://www.secondlife.com/">Second Life</a>, a multi-player online game without compulsory trophy hunts or totalitarian pizza-making. In fact, Second Life, which goes live in June, doesn't push gamers into any kind of scripted quest. What exactly do you do? &quot;I build stuff,&quot; one beta tester told me. And build they do: Second Life's landscape is Beverly Hills gone wild, a bucolic expanse of trees, hills, and beaches dotted with one expansive dream house after another. Every home has its custom playthings. In an afternoon demo, I was invited to twirl on a tire swing, jam on a purple electric guitar with a drummer whose practice space overlooks the swimming pool (the game kept our sounds in sync, although he was in San Francisco and I was in Tribeca), and wander through a lethal maze of Doom<em>-</em> like tunnels. The game's makers, the tiny San Francisco startup <a href="http://lindenlab.com/">Linden Lab</a>, say the game is surprisingly popular with middle-aged women, who are less inclined to quest-oriented swordplay than to designing each other's dream homes. This may be the start of a new game genre: First person non-shooters for Mom.</p>
<p>As with other role-playing games, each player creates an avatar, a character that represents themselves in the game. But instead of buying prefab characters off the rack, Second Life players program them by manipulating 140 sliders that control mathematical variables rendered on the fly (be warned: you'll need an 800Mhz PC to play). The result is a Halloween party for grownups. One avatar is a ponytailed woman in pants, the next a meticulous clone of KISS frontman Paul Stanley. Another is a small monkey, followed by a guy who looks like the Unix programmer he probably is in real life. The characters look dorky in screenshots, but come alive when they move. Instead of flat, &quot;isometric&quot; graphics, the game is rendered in full 3-D perspective, so you can swoop around the scenery in your own Bullet Time.</p>
<p> Second Life's construction materials are also defined at more of a mathematical, raw-materials level than other games. Instead of an inventory of pre-rendered building blocks, players can get their hands on the game's geometric primitives to stretch, twist, and texture them—like working with Play-Doh instead of LEGOs. Don't like what's available for download? You can design your own parts without needing high-end graphics software. If the Sims Online is a virtual consumer culture, Second Life is a tinkerer's wonderland. The game's beta testers (you can still join for free until the official launch) tend to gush over their ability to craft custom objects, ranging from musical instruments and weapons to a high-rise knockoff of the <em>Blade Runner </em> set.</p>
<p>So what's the point of a game with no goal? Second Life is reminiscent of the original concept for <a href="http://burningman.com/">Burning Man</a>: &quot;Make your own damn world.&quot; For people who hate learning to play by the rules, Second Life offers them a chance to locally define the rules for themselves, and to explore what others are doing with the same freedom. Sure, you can chat up other gamers, but most of my conversations with players in and outside the game revolved around building stuff. There's a sense of playful anarchy to the whole thing. The landscape is a crazy jumble of characters and architectures that would drive any central planner mad. In a few months of beta testing, players have put up spartan frontier cabins, glass dream houses, and a Japanese dojo within sight of one another. </p>
<p>The game's one sop to scorekeeping is its virtual economy, a tax-and-spend system that punishes resource consumption and rewards popular characters and projects. I couldn't follow the details, but it sounded alarmingly like the European Union. My guess is that beta testers won't complain, but customers asked to fork over $14.95 monthly this summer will find ways to hack around the requirement to impress others. Second Life isn't really a game; it's a virtual world for people who don't care to win either a firefight or a popularity contest. The idea isn't to get a life, but to build one of your own. And wasn't that the coolest part of the original Sims—creating your own private Idaho?&nbsp; </p>Fri, 16 May 2003 18:59:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/05/escape_from_simcity.htmlPaul Boutin2003-05-16T18:59:00ZAt last, an online game without sword fights or pizza-making.TechnologyBuild your dream house online in Second Life.2083018Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2083018falsefalsefalseBuild your dream house online in Second Life.Build your dream house online in Second Life.The 10-10-220 of File-Sharinghttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/04/the_1010220_of_filesharing.html
<p> A few record execs must have wandered into Steve Jobs'<a href="http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/r/reality-distortion_field.html">reality distortion field</a>. After four years of denial, doublespeak, and lawsuits over digital music, all five major labels—Sony, Time Warner, Universal, BMG, and EMI—have somehow been persuaded by the Apple CEO to finally deliver a music service worth paying for.</p>
<p>At least, that's my verdict after a morning spent with the <a href="http://www.apple.com/music/">iTunes Music Store</a>, unveiled today at one of Jobs' famous <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/specialmusicevent/">stage ceremonies</a> in San Francisco's Moscone Center. The store is built right into a newly downloadable version of the <a href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/">iTunes</a> software for the Mac. Just sign up with a U.S. credit card for an account at the Apple Store (iTunes walks you through this if you haven't already bought from the Apple Store in the past), and you can download any of 200,000 songs—from Franz Joseph Haydn to Eminem—provided by the five major labels. Most are 99 cents, although new tracks that you can't buy on CD (such as Eminem's &quot;These Drugs&quot;) are bundled with other exclusive songs and sold in packs of two or three ($1.98 and $2.97, respectively). You can listen to 30-second clips of everything in the store, and you get to keep songs you buy forever, even if you sell your current computer: Apple lets you designate up to three computers as &quot;yours&quot; at any one time and will play your songs on any of them. Plus, if you've got an iPod, you can transfer your music to it and take it with you.</p>
<p>The downloads come in the <a href="http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/aac/">AAC</a> format supported by Apple's computers and iPods. Even at a modest 128 kbps, AAC sounds better than most MP3s, although that may be because professional encoding sounds better than at-home amateur ripping. More important, AAC is unfettered by the clunky copyright protection technologies that keep other pay-to-play music services' tunes from playing outside your PC (and sometimes inside it). Apple has built a few roadblocks into iTunes to make it tough to pass around free copies of a song after you've paid for it, but enterprising students are picking the locks already. </p>
<p>The iTunes Music Store's real innovation isn't its technology. It's the pricing. By getting the major labels to sell one song (or at most two or three) at a time, Jobs has broken the album-oriented business model that's served the music industry ever since Columbia introduced the <a href="http://www.kcmetro.cc.mo.us/pennvalley/biology/lewis/crosby/lphist.htm">long-playing record</a> in 1948. Usually, a hit single is sold as part of an album package, a proven hook to get buyers to justify forking over $17 because they like one song. In their more honest moments, music execs admit that albums are a bait-and-switch tactic, a lucrative one they're reluctant to give up without a proven alternative. That's why, four years into the post-Napster world, none of the major labels have tried the buck-a-song approach before. </p>
<p>Except for once: <a href="http://www.emusic.com/">EMusic</a> offered 99 cent downloads from big-name artists. But EMusic's deep-pocketed funders switched the service to a subscription offer in 2000, <a href="http://news.com.com/2100-1023-242683.html">convinced</a> by surveys of Napster users who said they'd gladly pay 10 or 20 bucks a month for a service like it. But Napster had every song you could ever want, so of course you'd subscribe.</p>
<p>The labels mistakenly thought that online subscriptions were the way for them to make money from digital consumers. It made sense on the surface—people happily subscribe to ISPs, cell-phone services, even Web sites. Music buyers rejected the actual offerings, though. Products like <a href="http://launch.yahoo.com/">Yahoo! Music</a> and <a href="http://pressplay.com/">Press<em>Play</em></a> (and the iTunes Music Store) offer only a subset of all the music you might want, depending on which labels they've signed up. And unless you read <em>Billboard</em>, you'll never know what's missing until you try to download it. Can you name which label <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2079624/">Fischerspooner</a> is on? How about the Dixie Chicks? If I commit $120 for the next year to Press<em>Play</em> and an equal amount to <a href="http://www.realone.com/">RealOne</a> will that get me every song I want in 2003, or will I have to pay yet another service to get it? No wonder the kids are all on KaZaa.</p>
<p>For the first time in three years, iTunes lets music buyers pay for only the songs they want. No more albums bundled with unwanted songs, and no more monthly fees. If you like the Chicks' version of &quot;Landslide,&quot; it's yours for a buck. If, instead of buying the rest of the album, you'd rather cull 16 more songs from other artists, you can. Need &quot;We Will Rock You&quot; for the big school rally? Ninety-nine cents. The company hasn't said whether or not it will carry music from independent labels outside the big five. But if Apple doesn't carry your favorite song, who cares? You didn't pay them any money anyway.</p>
<p>Still, it's hard to say after one morning if Apple's music store will be a hit. The initial 200,000-song catalog isn't really that big—still no Fischerspooner despite the band's album on EMI and frequent MTV appearances. Plus, iTunes doesn't work for Windows users. Is it enough to make you buy a Mac? Probably not.</p>
<p>But for once the price feels right rather than a rip-off. The suits from the&nbsp;big five&nbsp;labels find themselves squinting into a bright new future, one in which they'll still get my dollars. But now they'll have to earn them one at a time.</p>Mon, 28 Apr 2003 22:10:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/04/the_1010220_of_filesharing.htmlPaul Boutin2003-04-28T22:10:00ZNinety-nine cents for all your songs at Apple's new music store.TechnologyThe 10-10-220 of file-sharing.2082157Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2082157falsefalsefalseThe 10-10-220 of file-sharing.The 10-10-220 of file-sharing.The Apple of&nbsp;the music-service worldThe Fix Is Inhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/04/the_fix_is_in.html
<p> The <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/904118.asp?0cv=TB10">SARS e-mail worm</a> going around this week is nothing to worry about, but it's only a matter of time before the next big hack attack knocks out half the Internet. After all the money spent Y2K-proofing every computer on the planet, the 21<sup>st</sup> century's digital pox turned out to be a different bug, one that's still unfixed. <a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/sapphire/">Slammer</a>, <a href="http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2001-19.html">Code Red</a>, <a href="http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.nimda.a@mm.html">Nimda</a>, and other Internet worms crawl into computers through a hole called a &quot;buffer overflow.&quot; It's an old trick that involves connecting to one of a target computer's network services—e-mail, HTTP, a database—and handing that service a carefully crafted string of data that's longer than it's supposed to be. The data gets written into its allocated parking spot in the computer's memory (the buffer), but the extra-long tail (the overflow) spills out to overwrite running code parked in the next space. Sounds stupid, but it's that easy. A moderately smart programmer can figure out how to put a new program in the overflow data and force the target computer to run it.</p>
<p>The most damaging attacks install a program that replicates itself as fast and far as possible, jamming network lines with its traffic. Programmers have worried about buffer overflow attacks ever since the <a href="http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/morris-worm.html">Morris worm</a> brought the fledgling Internet to a crawl 15 years ago. Yet building a barricade to block attacking worms has been all theory and no practice. Even mighty Linux is <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=linux+%22buffer+overflow%22+vulnerability">vulnerable</a>.</p>
<p>But on May 1, a gaggle of programmers will publish working source code that solves the problem. They call it a &quot;prophylactic&quot; that protects against buffer overflows. It doesn't eliminate the bugs, but it keeps them from taking over your computer. The free fix is for the little-used <a href="http://www.openbsd.org/">OpenBSD</a> operating system, but it's a working template that programmers can adopt into Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or whatever. To explain why the OpenBSD gang finally decided just to sit down and solve the problem, project leader Theo de Raadt <a href="http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-996584.html">told</a> a reporter that &quot;when you throw a bunch of guys into a room and get them drunk, this is what you get.&quot;</p>
<p>I hope they've got another keg in the closet because they'll need it to cope with the backlash their fix will create. Building a brick wall for worms seems like an obvious improvement, but to make it work, de Raadt's team had to rethink the entire way the operating system allocates and uses memory. It changes the way programs are compiled, and it slows down the computer's performance (by only a few percentage points, de Raadt claims). Worst of all, it requires other techies to rewrite parts of mission-critical applications, update operating systems, and possibly reinstall the operating system on every one of their company's computers in order to put the fix into place.</p>
<p>Such an upgrade could cost thousands of dollars for a small company, millions for a big one. Not to mention that any engineer knows that fixing one bug can introduce another, and &quot;don't break my applications&quot; is an IT manager's prime directive. That's why no one's bothered to stop buffer overflows—not even as an option—for the past 15 years. But the cost of refusing the cure keeps getting higher. In 1988, the Morris worm knocked out only a few geek enclaves. This past January, Slammer grounded airline flights, put 911 callers on hold, and shut down <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/slammerworm030127.html">900 computers</a> at the Department of Defense.</p>
<p>That kind of threat led the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to underwrite a $2.3 million grant to OpenBSD in 2001 as part of a search for crack-proof computers. But DARPA <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/politics/24HACK.html?ex=1051761600&amp;en=87a56d5c962b64e4&amp;ei=5062&amp;partner=GOOGLE">withdrew</a> its funding last week, allegedly because of <a href="http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/">an interview</a> with the<em> Globe and Mail</em> in which de Raadt veered from explaining his team's new code to call the war in Iraq an oil grab. &quot;It just sickens me,&quot; he said. &quot;I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile doesn't get built.&quot;</p>
<p>In the end, it doesn't matter whether de Raadt gets his grant back. It's more important that programmers at Microsoft (which owns <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>—you guys listening?) take a good hard look at his code next week. After all, Slammer, Code Red, and Nimda did their damage by attacking Microsoft applications running on Windows. They could just as well have hit OpenBSD, or Linux, or my PowerBook, but Microsoft's market share makes it the cracker's target of choice. </p>
<p>For now, Microsoft won't say whether or not the next Windows upgrade, due in 2005, will have built-in buffer overflow protection. But a few weeks before Slammer hit, I sat in the front row of a talk on &quot;<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/10-02trustworthywp.asp">Trustworthy Computing</a>&quot; by Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Craig Mundie. With Internet shutdowns now seen as a potential <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2079549/">terror tool</a>, Mundie told us it was time for pre-emptive strikes. &quot;Even if it means we're going to break some of your apps,&quot; <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/11-13svspeaker.asp">he said</a>, &quot;we're going to make these things more secure, and you're just going to have to go back and pay the price.&quot; Promise?</p>Thu, 24 Apr 2003 19:04:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/04/the_fix_is_in.htmlPaul Boutin2003-04-24T19:04:00ZProgrammers can stop Internet worms. Will they?TechnologyKilling Internet worms.2081943Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2081943falsefalsefalseKilling Internet worms.Killing Internet worms.Spam Report Card: The War Profiteershttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/04/spam_report_card_the_war_profiteers.html
<p>Enough nattering about Halliburton as the big, bad profiteer of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Sure, Dick Cheney's former employer should make a mint rebuilding oil wells, but at least the company's windfall won't occur until after the howitzers have fallen silent. Within hours of the initial March 19 bombing raid on Baghdad, by contrast, American e-mail in-boxes were awash in war-related product pitches. What's an armed conflict, after all, without a few tasteful souvenir coins to mark the occasion—complete with handsome display cases and certificates of authenticity, of course.</p>
<p>In case you've missed out on the marketing barrage, here's <em><strong>Slate</strong></em>'s report card on the best and worst of the war spam.</p>
<p><strong>&quot;Game Over 2003&quot; and &quot;We're Back Iraq 2003&quot; T-Shirts</strong> Source: IraqTshirts.com Price: $19.99 (plus $3.99 shipping and handling); $2 more for XXL sizes Patriotic Correctness Grade: B Tackiness: B+ The &quot;Game Over&quot; design, featuring an overly jowly Saddam in the cross hairs, is the best this relentlessly annoying spammer has to offer. The skull and crossbones on the top corner of the despot's French-style beret is a nice touch and perhaps a subtle dig at the Gallic dissenters across the Pond. &quot;We're Back,&quot; with its Old-Glory-themed victory sign, seems like it'll age less gracefully—especially if the coming occupation stretches into 2004. Warning: Web site plays a dreadful .wav version of &quot;America the Beautiful&quot; without prompting. <strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>&quot;United We Stand&quot; and &quot;Thank God I'm Free&quot; T-Shirt</strong> Source: HotProductOutlet.com Price: $19.99 Patriotic Correctness: A-Tackiness: D+ These exceedingly cheesy offerings appear to be leftovers from Operation Enduring Freedom. The vendors avoided an overstock nightmare by simply stamping &quot;2003&quot; on the upper-belly area. There's no mention of Iraq or Saddam, aside from the vague &quot;Support Our Troops&quot; slogan that graces a few styles. The smirking bald-eagle logo has kitsch value, much like an airbrushed Valkyrie painting circa 1978. The good news: Buy two shirts, and get free shipping—a $5.95 value, per the proprietors.</p>
<p><strong>&quot;One Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words&quot; T-shirt<br /></strong>Source: Best4PrintingV2.com<br />Price: $14.95<br />Patriotic Correctness: B<br />Tackiness: B<br />For the frat boy in all of us: A solider takes a moment to, uh, &quot;drain the main vein&quot; on a pensive painting of Saddam. Currently sold out, alas.</p>
<p><strong> Semper Fi Edition Limited Figurines and Faithful Fuzzies Salutes the Navy</strong> Source: CollectiblesToday.com Price: $19.99 (plus $3.99 S&amp;H) Patriotic Correctness: B-Tackiness: C-Obviously targeted toward the parents of soldiers, as few self-respecting jarheads or sailors likely salivate over the prospect of owning a 4-and-a-half-inch &quot;seaworthy teddy.&quot; Those who do fall for the solemn-faced ursine figurines should act fast, as production is &quot;limited to 295 casting days.&quot; The site recommends the &quot;subscription plan,&quot; which ensures that you'll &quot;never again risk a price increase&quot; if you commit to buying each and every bellicose bear that the Hamilton Collection churns out. <strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong> Operation Iraqi Freedom Coin</strong> Source: WebDesignProfessional.com/iraqi_freedom Price: $39.95 (plus $4.95 S&amp;H) Patriotic Correctness: A-Tackiness: C Minted from &quot;.999 Troy Ounce Silver,&quot; which goes for about $4.50 per ounce, this Highland Mint coin features the soon-to-be-immortal Bush quote: &quot;We will bring freedom to others, and we will prevail.&quot; There is a promise that $5 from each purchase will go toward &quot;both a veteran's charity as well as a relief organization,&quot; though no specific recipients are mentioned. Perhaps another dollar or so could be set aside to teach the spammer about the nuances of capitalization. &quot;A Portion of the Proceeds will be going directly to Charity&quot;?</p>
<p><strong> Operation Freedom Legal Tender</strong> <strong>U.S.</strong><strong> Coin<br /></strong> Source: RazmatazCoins.com Price: $19.95 (plus $5.95 S&amp;H) Patriotic Correctness: B-Tackiness: D As far as I can tell, the word &quot;Iraqi&quot; is not trademarked. So what's up with the &quot;Operation Freedom&quot; label? Also, note that this is merely a Kennedy half dollar, with the heads side altered by the addition of a colored logo. So, in essence, this spammer is selling disfigured 50-cent pieces for $20. On the plus side, the bauble does feature &quot;the world's highest quality colorizing,&quot; and a &quot;deluxe jewel case&quot;—deluxe!—is included. Also, for every coin you purchase, Razmataz promises to send a matching coin to &quot;a military personnel&quot; (sic). Just what a soldier needs to get him or her through the long Iraqi summer. <strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>Defenders of Freedom U.S. Dollar Coin<br /></strong>Source: PerfectCollectibles.com<br />Price: $19.95 (plus $4.95 S&amp;H)<br />Patriotic Correctness: B<br />Tackiness: C+<br />Another colorized coin, this time a silver dollar accompanied by a &quot;deluxe museum quality display case&quot; and a certificate of authenticity (&quot;a $15 value&quot;). Purports to honor five branches of the military, though the Coast Guard gets the shaft on the heads side. Also promises to send 10 percent of the proceeds to &quot;this nonprofit organization of more than one million veterans disabled during wartime,&quot; though the literature never bothers to clear up who &quot;this&quot; refers to. Oh, and limit five per household, please.</p>
<p><strong>&quot;Do You Support a War Against </strong><strong>Iraq</strong><strong>?&quot; Internet Survey<br /></strong>Source: InternetSurveyPanel.com<br />Price: Your Privacy<br />Patriotic Correctness: F<br />Tackiness: F<br />The classic Internet marketing con, whereby you're asked to participate in an &quot;important&quot; poll—a process which also requires that you reveal details regarding your age, gender, occupation, household income, marital status, and education. &quot;Various prizes&quot; are promised if you kick in your two cents about Iraq. Uh-huh.<strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>&quot;Interpreting the Signs&quot; Newsletter<br /></strong>Source: LeftBehindProphecy.com<br />Price: $29.95<br />Patriotic Correctness: F<br />Tackiness: D<br />&quot;Will WAR IN IRAQ launch an unstoppable chain of events of [<em>sic</em>]&nbsp;that lead to ARMAGEDDON?&quot; The authors behind the evangelical Left Behind books claim to have the lowdown on that question, as well as the inside scoop on the sinister connection between ATMs and the Mark of the Beast. At $30 per subscription, eschatological insight don't come cheap.</p>
<p><strong> Norton SystemWorks&nbsp;With American Flag Bonus</strong> Source: Platinum-deal.com Price: $39.95 Patriotic Correctness: A-Tackiness: B+ Show your enthusiasm for Iraqi regime change by protecting your PC against viruses and Internet clutter. Once you've got the software installed, go out to the garage and proudly decorate your car with the free American flag antenna ball. No mention of the trinket's value, but it's got to be worth at least as much as one of those coin display cases. <strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>Farouk Al-Bashar's &quot;Urgent Assistance Needed&quot; E-Mail<br /></strong>Source: A Nigerian cybercafe, most likely<br />Price: Potentially your entire savings<br />Patriotic Correctness: F<br />Tackiness: F<br />An Iraqi oil heir happens to have $12.5 million in cash lying around, and he needs some assistance spiriting it out of Baghdad. Kindly forward your bank account details, and he'll give you a 10 percent cut. It's a new spin on the ol' <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2072851/">Nigerian 419 scam</a>, by which a gullible Westerner is separated from his or her funds. Buy the &quot;Operation Freedom&quot; coin, if you must, but please steer clear of Farouk.</p>Fri, 11 Apr 2003 15:50:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/04/spam_report_card_the_war_profiteers.htmlBrendan Koerner2003-04-11T15:50:00ZTechnologySpam report card.2081385Brendan KoernerWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2081385falsefalsefalseSpam report card.Spam report card.The Army's Desktop Jockeyshttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/the_armys_desktop_jockeys.html
<p> The home page for the U.S. Army's <a href="http://www.hood.army.mil/4id/">4<sup>th</sup> Infantry Division</a>, part of a 30,000-strong force currently on its way to Iraq, touts the 4ID as &quot;the Army's first digital division.&quot; A name like that suggests that the rest of the military moves at less than Internet speed, but the gear the 4ID will carry into battle includes an impressive adaptation of off-the-shelf PC parts into battle-ready boxes. The idea is to bring the benefits of office IT to the world's most hostile work environment.</p>
<p>The division's tanks, Bradleys, Humvees, Paladin howitzers, and helicopters are equipped with Pentium-powered <a href="http://www.littondsd.com/products/computers/applique.html">Appliqu&eacute;+</a> computers that talk to one another on a wireless network using the same TCP/IP protocols as the rest of us. (The Army calls the network that links the 4ID's vehicles the Tactical Internet. Technically, it's a private intranet, but that's good enough for government work.) Dubbed <a href="http://www.tio-armytransformation.net/aepublic/abcs/fbcb2_ps.htm">FBCB2</a> in Pentagon speak, the $800 million project is the centerpiece of the military's new digital battlefield. Officers and soldiers in each of the 4ID's five brigades will be able to share a common, up-to-date <a href="http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/cannon/bull.pdf">picture</a>, marking the GPS-plotted locations of both friendlies and hostile forces in the battle zone. </p>
<p>For reliability, Appliqu&eacute; software runs on the Solaris operating system rather than Windows. In addition to downloadable maps and video gamelike updates of everyone's location, Appliqu&eacute; includes both long- and short-form text message systems (think e-mail and instant messaging) to augment voice radio commands that can be missed, misheard, or forgotten. Commanders can send encrypted orders individually or to groups. Individual soldiers can message one another. Updates of troop locations come into the command post, and new maps and plans whoosh back out, without the need for the white boards and sticky pens soldiers used to scribble with during battle.</p>
<p>The system is more than maps and e-mail, though. In the current flick <em> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2079761/">Tears of the Sun</a></em>, Bruce Willis' Navy Seals team downloads live satellite plots of advancing Nigerian rebels onto its laptop, with each soldier appearing as a little dot. The real-life FBCB2 isn't quite that wired, but it's close. Information on enemy locations comes in from satellites, as well as from human observers in planes and on the ground. The 4ID's arsenal includes the Long Range Advanced Scout Surveillance System (<a href="http://www.raytheon.com/products/lras3/">LRAS3</a>), a truck-mounted superscope that combines high-powered lenses, heat-based imaging, GPS, and laser-range finders to let scouts spot and plot the enemy into FBCB2 without having to creep up close enough to get shot.</p>
<p>With enemy locations pinpointed on the computer, it makes sense to jack their whereabouts into the gun sights, too. Geeks in the audience for <em>Tears of the Sun</em> snickered when Willis was able to download his attackers' positions from a satellite but unable to upload them to the fighter pilots who zoomed in for the kill. By contrast, the 4ID's attack helicopters are equipped with a Linux-powered box called IDM (<a href="http://www.lynuxworks.com/corporate/news/success/ici.php3">Improved Data Modem</a>), a sort of universal translator that can transfer targeting info directly from planes or the ground. Click-click, bang-bang. </p>
<p>But lethal as it sounds, the system has yet to prove itself in the heat of desert battle. Appliqu&eacute; computers are tested to withstand severe shock and sandstorm conditions, but one <a href="http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c477.htm">online poster</a> claiming to be an Army captain calls FBCB2 &quot;a very temperamental piece of equipment at its best.&quot; A lieutenant who participated in field tests cited the downside of new computers on the job: &quot;Commanders sometimes become fixated on the system and don't look at terrain as much as they should.&quot; </p>
<p>Even Pentagon spokespeople concede that claims that the Tactical Internet will &quot;clear the fog of war&quot; are overstated. For one thing, FBCB2 doesn't have built-in friend-or-foe identification, at least not yet. And once the shells start flying, the most advanced information systems can't override the human instinct to shoot first and check the chart later. &quot;If I'm at war, and I'm not sure who you are, you're dead. That's how it works,&quot; one Vietnam vet told me. Desert Storm veterans have <a href="http://www.polyconomics.com/sy.html">described firsthand</a> the terror of being fired on by their own Bradleys from within the line of sight while screaming over the radio at them to stop. In a situation like that, sending an instant message instead won't make much difference.</p>Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:02:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/the_armys_desktop_jockeys.htmlPaul Boutin2003-04-01T00:02:00ZCan information technology help the military win the war?TechnologyThe Army's first &quot;digital division.&quot;2080955Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2080955falsefalsefalseThe Army's first "digital division."The Army's first "digital division."Wired&nbsp;for warThe Saddam Showhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/the_saddam_show.html
<p>Americans have a knee-jerk reaction when they see Saddam Hussein's speeches and footage of American POWs from the <a href="http://62.145.94.28/">Iraq Satellite Channel</a> aired on U.S. networks: What do you mean, there's a TV channel I can't get? </p>
<p>Don't worry, you can add the Iraq Satellite Channel to your 500-channel universe with a little tinkering. Iraqi television is rebroadcast onto the Net by the Dutch service <a href="http://www.dsltv.nl/">DSL-TV</a>, in both Real and Windows Media formats. The catch is that unlike ish.com's <a href="http://www.ish.com/">Al Jazeera</a> stream from Germany, DSL-TV tries to limit its service to computers inside the Netherlands as part of its terms of service.</p>
<p>But for the savvy Net surfer, that's an easy problem to get around. Like Web browsers, streaming media players allow you to use what's called a <a href="http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/p/proxy_server.html">proxy server</a> to make your computer's requests take place from inside the Netherlands—or from whatever country you prefer. (Baghdad blogger <a href="http://dearraed.blogspot.com/">Salam Pax</a> uses this technique from inside Iraq to reach blocked Web sites and send untraceable e-mail to his fans.) Hackers who support the free, anonymous flow of information host publicly available proxies from all over the world, and lists of them are available on sites such as <a href="http://www.publicproxyservers.com/">Public Proxy Servers</a>. </p>
<p>To watch the Iraq Satellite Channel on your computer, click through the list of proxies at Public Proxy Servers until you find one located in the Netherlands. Jot down its IP address (which looks something like 12.345.67.89) and port number (probably 80 or 8080). Find the option to set a proxy on your Web browser. (On the latest version of Internet Explorer for Windows, select Internet Options -&gt; Connections -&gt; LAN Settings.) Plug in the IP address and port number. Save the settings, then open the DSL link. Click on the streaming link for the Iraq Satellite Channel. If your software is fairly new, Internet Explorer will pop up the video in a separate panel and begin playing it. Or you may have to separately set the HTTP proxy on your Windows Media Player or Real player, each of which has its own Preferences or Options menus. I tuned in with both Windows Media on a PC and with RealOne on a Mac. Two caveats: You'll need a broadband connection, and if your local network has a firewall or VPN, you may get error messages instead of video.</p>
<p>Iraqi TV looks like local-access cable, or at least state-sponsored local-access propaganda. It's not all Saddam, all the time, despite the frequent canned footage of him. Some of the fare is strikingly similar to American television: news reports, speeches, music videos (some with lots of guns in them), and poignant interviews with big-eyed children in hospital beds. There are frequent updates on the war. Last time I checked, Iraq's Minister of Information, <a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/100000/images/_100868_TT.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_100000/100868.stm&amp;h=180&amp;w=150">Muhammad Said as Sahhaf</a>, was speaking from a podium cluttered with microphones. Last night, I saw the notorious photos of American prisoners.</p>
<p>Viewers be warned: American TV networks make daily decisions on what to show or not to show their viewers. On the Internet, it's easy to route around those decisions. If blogging makes everyone a journalist, then tricks like this one make everyone their own news producer. If you're squeamish, or if you're the relative of an American soldier, you may not want to watch images that the TV networks have deemed unfit for American audiences. But if you want to narrowcast the Iraq Satellite Channel to yourself to see what's being fed to the Iraqi people during this war, you can.</p>Tue, 25 Mar 2003 21:42:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/the_saddam_show.htmlPaul Boutin2003-03-25T21:42:00ZHow to watch Iraqi TV on the Web.TechnologyHow to watch Saddam's TV network on the Web.2080681Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2080681falsefalsefalseHow to watch Saddam's TV network on the Web.How to watch Saddam's TV network on the Web.Stop the Clockhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/stop_the_clock.html
<p>On the Top 10 list for misquoted statements, Moore's Law comes in a close second, right behind &quot;Alas, poor Yorick, I <a href="http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/misquotes.html">knew him well</a>.&quot; So many differing <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22moore's+law%22+definition&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8">definitions</a> abound for Gordon Moore's edict that two years ago, in a fit of desperation, I e-mailed the Intel co-founder and asked for the original. To my surprise, he replied. &quot;The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year&quot; was his statement in a 1965 issue of <em>Electronics</em> magazine. Moore meant that the number of transistors and other parts that could be crammed onto one silicon chip, while still keeping to the lowest cost, would double annually. (In the '70s, he raised the doubling time to 18 months.) To sort out the confusion, Intel has since posted Moore's <a href="http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:OU3qKJn1b8kC:www.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf+%22gordon+moore%22+paper+%22moore's+law%22&amp;hl=en&amp;ie=UTF-8">article</a>. </p>
<p>Moore's point four decades ago was that integrated chips—the technology that replaced separately wired transistors—were rapidly incorporating more and more components onto one chunk of silicon. How that would benefit human computer users, Moore didn't specify. Yet his law became an all-purpose catchphrase for the rapid doubling of CPU clock speed. It's also been applied to memory size, disk drive capacity, modem bandwidth—anything related to computing. Even trained engineers knowingly misuse the term as conversational shorthand. I've been <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2076336/">guilty</a> myself.</p>
<p>The doubling-the-clock-speed definition of Moore's Law was also embraced by the company that Moore co-founded. For a decade, Intel has let us believe it was scientific fact that the company's CPU chips would double in clock speed every 18 months. Silicon Valley insiders gripe that Intel has made Moore's Law a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because customers will buy a twice-as-fast chip every 18 months, the money is available to make it happen. <em> <a href="http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue122/index.htm">Red Herring</a></em>'s final issue last month devoted its cover to &quot;<a href="http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue122/5945.html">The Tyranny of Moore's Law</a>,&quot; a claim that along with its chip speeds, Intel's research and development budget was doubling every year and a half, a fast-growing fiscal burden crushing not only Intel but the tech industry (and, presumably, <em>Red Herring</em>) with it. </p>
<p>The confusion over the meaning of Moore's Law led some industry watchers to raise their eyebrows at Intel's new, unspoken shift in strategy: With the launch of the <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2080037/">Centrino</a> mobile chip set, Intel has abandoned the shorthand definition of Moore's Law. For the first time in its history, Intel isn't touting the clock speed of a new CPU. The Pentium M central processor at the core of Centrino ticks over at a lazy 1.6 gigahertz, 20 percent slower than last year's mobile version of the Pentium 4. But despite its slower clock speed, Centrino doesn't mean that Intel has given up on Gordon. </p>
<p>With Centrino, Intel proves that all those transistors can be used for lots of things, not just sheer speed. Pentium M's all-new design beats the P4's count of 54 million transistors on one chip with a new high of 77 million. It's not double the old count, but it's a big leap. Instead of cranking up the clock speed and then <a href="http://www.intel.com/home/desktop/pentium4/feature.htm?iid=ihc+home_p4_features&amp;">hunting for reasons</a> for PC owners to upgrade, Intel has turned around to meet its customers' biggest grievance: laptops that run out of juice. The extra transistors on the Pentium M bring more memory cache onto the same chip, saving precious battery power. Other new circuits are dedicated to controlling and conserving power. Centrino's built-in Wi-Fi is handled not by the Pentium M but on a separate chip. Still, integrating it next to the CPU reduces battery drain. </p>
<p>If Centrino-equipped laptops really run five, six, or eight hours on one battery charge, as claimed, that will be a doubling of another sort. It's unlikely that the doubling of battery life will become the next shorthand meaning of Moore's Law, but for <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/3936/m=6054273&amp;">laptop users</a>, it's something they need more than another couple of gigahertz. </p>Thu, 13 Mar 2003 21:59:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/stop_the_clock.htmlPaul Boutin2003-03-13T21:59:00ZIntel's Centrino shows the real meaning of Moore's Law.TechnologyIntel's Centrino and Moore's Law.2080097Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2080097falsefalsefalseIntel's Centrino and Moore's Law.Intel's Centrino and Moore's Law.Intel Outsidehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/intel_outside.html
<p> Everyone knows a <a href="http://www.wi-fialliance.org/">Wi-Fi</a> evangelist. He's that guy who bought a Linksys wireless base for his laptop last year and won't shut up about how he can get online in the house, on the patio, at Starbucks, and outside that green building on the left at Third and Main. He keeps offering to come over and set you up, as if you didn't have running water. Now imagine your evangelist with $300 million to burn. Would he run TV ads exhorting the world to unplug? Invest in companies to build his dream network? Unwire McDonald's?</p>
<p>That's pretty much the scope of Intel's marketing campaign for <a href="http://www.intel.com/products/mobiletechnology/">Centrino</a>, the company's new wireless technology that pairs a redesigned low-power Pentium CPU with a Wi-Fi radio chip. Touting built-in wireless and a claimed battery life of five to eight hours, Intel hopes to convince consumers and businesses to blow $1,500 or more on a yet another new computer—a Centrino-powered laptop that will &quot;unwire&quot; computer users from their desks, in the jargon of the <a href="http://mfile.akamai.com/2478/asf/ihc.download.akamai.com/2478/ads/moving_day/60_moving_day_56k.asx">just-unveiled ads</a>. Centrino's pitch is to let notebook users jettison both the Ethernet cable and the power cord for hours at a time: Internet access through the air, anywhere.</p>
<p>That's the theory, at least. In practice, people who rush out to buy Centrino laptops may find there's nowhere in town they can get online, unless they live in downtown Manhattan or San Francisco. In that light, Intel's marketing blitz, which includes multimillion dollar <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,79213,00.html">investments</a> in other companies, seems like hawking compact discs on the promise that disc players will show up later. </p>
<p>Press releases touting <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/030311/mcdonalds_intel_5.html">Wi-Fi at McDonald's</a> finesse the fact that more than 99 percent of the chain's 30,000-plus restaurants will still be without it next year. At Intel's launch event in New York today, Intel CEO Craig Barrett repeatedly referred to Centrino as a &quot;tipping point.&quot; But his guest speaker, <em>Tipping Point</em> author Malcolm Gladwell, told the audience that to reach such a point, &quot;Wi-Fi needs to be as ubiquitous as rock 'n' roll stations were&quot; during the portable transistor radio revolution of the '60s. That's a tall order: Wi-Fi base stations have an operating range of 50 feet to 300 feet, often less. Unlike cell-phone service, access points are run by thousands of separate personal and small-business operators under different log-on and billing schemes. Many home and business owners wisely refuse to share their networks.</p>
<p>The companies that deliver cell-phone service are best equipped to build nationwide Wi-Fi networks, but they're taking a wait-and-see approach. Wi-Fi requires completely different hardware than cellular phones, with base stations in many more locations due to their shorter range. FCC regulations have made it tough to develop a wide-area base station, and the rules also prevent wireless carriers from buying Wi-Fi spectrum to lock out competitors, as they do with cellular bandwidth. <a href="http://www.cometanetworks.com/company.html">Cometa</a>, a partnership that includes Intel, AT&amp;T, and IBM, claims it will offer wholesale Wi-Fi service to resellers nationwide, but the company's plans have yet to advance past a few McDonald's demo sites. Except for T-Mobile's unwiring of 2,000 Starbucks cafes, the telcos seem to be saying: If you come, we will build it.</p>
<p>Intel is gambling that it has the answer to this chicken-and-egg dilemma. If we buy Centrino laptops and unwire our homes or offices, there's a good chance we'll become Wi-Fi evangelists ourselves, demanding it wherever we go. Road warriors already plan their itineraries around access in airports and hotels. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz understands that offering Wi-Fi in his coffeehouses isn't about creating cybercafes, it's about luring well-paid workaholics who have 10 minutes to get caffeinated and check e-mail—the same people who drove demand for cellular service. Can loitering teens be far behind?</p>
<p>If personal computers were the first stage of the digital revolution and the Internet the second, then Wi-Fi is the third stage, letting you take your computer and the 'Net wherever you go. Once you've tasted it, it's hard to go without, even if it works only at home or at the office. &quot;It's like having sex with my computer—I'm all over the house!&quot; a neighbor instant-messaged me after installing her own base station. Intel expects Centrino to be a Pentium-sized hit that will sell new computers, and you can't blame Wi-Fi evangelists for being <a href="http://80211b.weblogger.com/2003/03/12">excited</a>. But to pull the plug and become a Wi-Fi evangelist yourself, you don't need a $1,500 Centrino laptop. A $50 card for your current one will do.</p>Wed, 12 Mar 2003 22:24:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/intel_outside.htmlPaul Boutin2003-03-12T22:24:00ZTechnologyIntel's new Centrino laptops.2080037Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2080037falsefalsefalseIntel's new Centrino laptops.Intel's new Centrino laptops.Will Intel's Centrino be the tipping point for Wi-Fi?Which Spam Filter Are You?http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/which_spam_filter_are_you.html
<p>The war on junk e-mail is winnable, but you'll have to go it alone. Recent <a href="http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20030212-114817-4851r.htm">survey results</a> showing that 9 of 10 American office workers support a federal ban on spam won't stop Congress from spinning its wheels for the <a href="http://www.cauce.org/legislation/index.shtml">third year</a> in a row. Meanwhile, your company or ISP could install a filtering system on its mail server, but chances are they already did. Like U.N. inspectors, the filters always seem to be one step behind the bad guys. That leaves it to you to mop up your inbox with a personal spam filter.</p>
<p>But which one? Spam filters use different approaches to handle incoming messages. Some stretch a velvet rope across your inbox, letting only preapproved senders reach you. Others use statistical analysis to decide what is and isn't junk. Still others tie their human users together to vote unpopular messages off the island. The program will serve as your personal assistant to friends and strangers trying to e-mail you, and it will require significant time and effort on your part to fine-tune it. </p>
<p>To pick the right solution, you don't need a product review—you need a personality test. </p>
<p> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2079307"></a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2079308"></a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2079306"></a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2079300"></a></p>Tue, 11 Mar 2003 17:22:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/which_spam_filter_are_you.htmlPaul Boutin2003-03-11T17:22:00ZTechnologyWhich spam filter are you?2079304Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2079304falsefalsefalseWhich spam filter are you?Which spam filter are you?Google's Memory Upgradehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/googles_memory_upgrade.html
<p>Why did <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> buy <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a>?&nbsp; Ever since the news <a href="http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000802.shtml">leaked</a> a few weeks ago, the Web has been awash with speculation. So far, most theorizing has focused on the ways that Blogger could enhance Google's ability to search for Web pages. But the Blogger acquisition could open up an entirely new service for Google. Instead of just helping you find new things, Google could help you keep track of what you've already found. Right now Google is a kind of information detective, and a brilliant one at that. But it could be something more: an extension of your memory. </p>
<p>Up to now, Google's services have revolved entirely around organizing and packaging the Web so that you can better find information—whether in the form of its <a href="http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en">flagship search tool</a>, or the <a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a> service, or its online shopping experiment, <a href="http://froogle.google.com/">Froogle</a>. But Google has not yet ventured into managing the information and surfing history of individual users.</p>
<p>If Google went in this direction with the Blogger acquisition, it would hearken back to one of the seminal documents of the computing age: Vannevar Bush's 1946 &quot;<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm">As We May Think</a>&quot; essay, which envisioned a new tool to augment human memory. Bush's imaginary device, called the Memex, would help manage the ever-accelerating explosion of information in the world. Bush imagined the Memex as a machine of connected documents that from one angle looks a great deal like the modern, Web-enabled computer. But in one crucial respect, Bush's vision differed from today's Web: He placed great importance on the <em>trails</em> created as the user moved through information space, assuming that a record of those trails would be of great use in amplifying the signal of human memory. In many ways, our networked computers have wildly exceeded Bush's vision, but our trail-recording tools are still woefully undernourished.</p>
<p>I've now spent the past eight years exploring the Web practically every day, and over that time I've probably stumbled across thousands of documents that were worth preserving, yet the tools I have for organizing that history are minimal at best. Bookmarks are helpful if you're tracking a dozen sites, but beyond useless if you're managing 10,000. If Google can organize the entire Web with such efficacy, imagine what it could do with a much smaller subset of documents. It could make each individual's long, meandering surfing history into something genuinely useful. Right now, the best tools for recording our surfing patterns are the family of Weblog tools on the market, Blogger being the most widely-recognized brand. Google is a tool for discovering new places to visit on the Web, and Blogger is a tool for recording those visits.</p>
<p>Blogger isn't nearly as adept at recording visits as Google is at searching for Web sites, but with the potential exception of other Weblog tools such <a href="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio</a> or <a href="http://www.movabletype.org/">Movable Type</a>, it's the best game in town. And by acquiring Blogger, Google gets access to the user base, thousands of individuals who are already sold on the premise of storing their Web actions for posterity. </p>
<p>How might Google's tools improve the existing Blogger technology? One feature might work like this: Each time I search for something on Google, a list of URLs is generated. When I click on one of those URLs, the page I've selected is automatically blogged for me: storing for posterity the text and location of the document. If I were an exhibitionist sort, I could choose to publish this list to the world, but more likely I'd keep it as a private archive, visible only to me. It would be a kind of outsourced memory, but one capable of making new connections on its own. Google could easily generate a list of all the pages that linked to the pages in my archive, or notify me if a page I discovered two years ago suddenly grew popular. I'd have the option of searching just my personal archive, instead of the entire Web—or searching the archive's extended family: both the pages I've surfed through, and the Web sites that link to those pages.</p>
<p>This idea of personalized link collections, augmented by software, is straight from the pages of &quot;As We May Think&quot;: &quot;Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear,&quot; Bush predicted, &quot;ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. … There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.&quot; Google is the encyclopedia of the connected age, and bloggers are the trailblazers. If Google simply uses Blogger to update its database more rapidly, it won't change the Web experience as we know it in any profound way. But a genuine trailblazing device would be a way of preserving—and widening—the paths that our lives have carved through information space.</p>
<p><em><p><em>Webhead thanks Enuma Onyeukwu for suggesting some of the details in the Google tracking application.</em></p></em></p>Thu, 06 Mar 2003 22:36:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/googles_memory_upgrade.htmlSteven Johnson2003-03-06T22:36:00ZHow Blogger could do more than improve Google's Web searches.TechnologyWhy did Google buy Blogger?2079747Steven JohnsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2079747falsefalsefalseWhy did Google buy Blogger?Why did Google buy Blogger?Bush's Cyberstrategeryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/bushs_cyberstrategery.html
<p>Seemingly innocuous movies occasionally have nasty, unintended consequences. <em>Jaws</em> creator Peter Benchley, for example, believes his tale of underwater mayhem has driven mankind to hunt several lethal shark species to the brink of extinction. Jodie Foster's bawdy turn in <em>Taxi Driver</em> helped stir would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr. to violence. And the 1983 Matthew Broderick vehicle <em>WarGames</em> convinced everyone that a lone hacker can wipe out the West Coast as easily as booting up Excel.</p>
<p>How else to explain the credulity with which the Bush administration's <em> <u><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/pcipb/">National Strategy To Secure Cyberspace</a></u></em> was greeted last month? The 76-page document is chock full of what computer-security experts term &quot;FUD&quot;—geek shorthand for spreading bogus &quot;fear, uncertainty, and doubt.&quot; Never mind that the hype over alleged &quot;cyberterrorism&quot; has been <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0211.green.html">thoroughly</a> <a href="http://online.securityfocus.com/columnists/111">debunked</a>, <a href="http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-955293.html">time</a> and <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,70844,00.html">time</a> <a href="http://www.netfreedom.org/news.asp?item=172">again</a>. The government's information technology sages still trot out dubious stats in support of a looming &quot;cyberwar,&quot; claiming that hostile nations possess legions of computer-savvy shock troops ready to knock out New York's electricity, zap the nation's phone lines, or open up the Hoover Dam.</p>
<p>Yet here we are in 2003, and the cyberterrorism casualty list is still barren. Sure, some Serb hackers slowed down the NATO Web site during the Kosovo conflict, and a couple of Chinese hackers defaced sites in the wake of their country's embassy being bombed. But, honestly, did either incident get you quaking in your Keds? </p>
<p>Still, the Bush <em>Strategy</em> does its best to play up the drama. It notes, for example, that &quot;Identified computer security vulnerabilities—faults in software and hardware that could permit unauthorized network access or allow an attacker to cause network damage—increased significantly from 2000 to 2002, with the number of vulnerabilities going from 1,090 to 4,129.&quot; Scary-sounding, yes, but virtually meaningless. The generally accepted bug rate for software is between five and 15 errors per 1,000 lines of code, which means that your typical Windows operating system probably has close to 300,000 potential &quot;vulnerabilities.&quot; Not every bug is exploitable, but you get the picture—mass-produced software has always been woefully insecure, and those 4,129 reported holes represent only a tiny fraction of the total. </p>
<p>But the increase in reported vulnerabilities is actually a <em>good</em> thing for computer security since it allows for patches to be designed. So this stat works against the report's case that (as Bush writes in his intro) &quot;threats in cyberspace have risen dramatically.&quot; Besides, the vast majority of attacks exploit less than a dozen major vulnerabilities. If system administrators simply took the time to patch those well-publicized problems, the <em>Strategy</em> might have clocked in at a more readable length.</p>
<p>The <em>Strategy</em> employs some fuzzy math to amp up the peril, stating that &quot;one estimate places the increase in cost to our economy from attacks to U.S. information systems at 400 percent over four years.&quot; There's no footnote as to where this estimate comes from, nor any mention of what dollar amount will be quadrupled. The report does quickly add, however, that &quot;While those losses remain relatively limited, that too could change abruptly.&quot;</p>
<p>Such hypothetical changes are a big theme throughout. The report makes a big deal out of recent worm attacks like NIMDA, then backtracks by adding, &quot;Despite the fact that NIMDA did not create a catastrophic disruption to the critical infrastructure. …&quot; Or there's this nugget: &quot;In wartime or crisis, adversaries may seek to intimidate the nation's political leaders by attacking critical infrastructures and key economic functions or eroding public confidence in information systems.&quot;</p>
<p>The notion that hackers could disrupt basic services is a favorite scare tactic of the <a href="http://www.nipc.gov/">National Infrastructure Protection Center</a>, formed by President Clinton to combat the cyberterror menace. NIPC is also one of the most ineffectual bureaucratic agencies ever to come down the pike. (Check out <a href="http://vmyths.com/resource.cfm?id=26&amp;page=1">this site</a> for a full account of NIPC's foibles.) Despite ostensibly being staffed by the nation's best and brightest cyberwarriors, NIPC has never bothered to mention that mission-critical systems are not designed for remote operation, which makes the whole Hoover Dam scenario implausible at best. Of course, toning down the hyperbole could mean fewer funds for NIPC, so why bother? (Richard Clarke, Clinton's cybersecurity czar during NIPC's formative years, is responsible for one of my favorite FUD quotes of all time: &quot;An attack on cyberspace is an attack on the United States, just as much as a landing on New Jersey.&quot; Uh-huh.)</p>
<p>To be fair, law enforcement is not the only entity beating the cyberterror drum. The computer-security industry is well-versed in hyping the threat, from making their self-serving &quot;experts&quot; available whenever another virus hits to planting hoaxes in the press, such as McAfee's notorious &quot;<a href="http://www.itworld.com/Sec/2199/020624jpegvirus/">JPEG virus</a>&quot; scam. Industry representatives spout ridiculously high estimates for cyberattack damages, such as the $1.2 billion price tag for the February 2000 &quot;Mafia Boy&quot; denial-of-service attacks; that number included the short-lived loss of market capitalization ascribed to the attacks. Microsoft (which owns <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>) is guilty of some particularly egregious FUDing. Last February, the Microsoft-led Business Software Alliance published a survey claiming that a major cyberattack would be launched against the United States within 12 months and that Uncle Sam should be sure to stock up on the latest security products. The deadline passed with nary an apology from the BSA.</p>
<p>But it's the government that circulates the real doozies. Absent any actual proof of cyberterrorism's existence, the <em>Strategy</em> dredges up an old myth regarding a series of 1998 attacks on the Pentagon, NASA, and several research labs. &quot;The intrusions,&quot; we're told, &quot;were targeted against those organizations that conduct advanced technical research on national security, including atmospheric and oceanographic topics as well as aircraft and cockpit design.&quot;</p>
<p>What's really being discussed here, however, is an amalgamation of several different incidents. One involves three teens—two Californians and an Israeli—who managed to hack their way into some unclassified Pentagon payroll files and some worthless dot-mil sites. Another is a shadowy Russian-based operation that the Department of Defense nicknamed &quot;Moonlight Maze&quot; and that the press characterized as a potential <em>WarGames</em> scenario—at least until DOD itself admitted that nothing of value was compromised. The last involved a gang calling itself the &quot;Masters of Downloading,&quot; which claimed to be able to &quot;take control&quot; of NASA satellites. This claim, too, was discredited. (Meanwhile in the offline world, a man posing as a CIA agent was able to tour sensitive NASA buildings for <em>eight months</em> before his ruse was discovered.)</p>
<p>None of this is to suggest that computer security isn't a problem. Corporate networks, in particular, are far from locked-down, and economic crime is an increasing headache for e-commerce enterprises and financial institutions alike. Occasionally it seems as if every credit card number in the world will eventually wind up in the hands of computer-savvy <a href="http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2002/feature_koerner_mayjun2002.html">Russian teenagers</a>. And, yes, the <em>Strategy</em> does make a few smart recommendations to deal with such issues, such as organizing a nationwide program to better train system administrators.</p>
<p>But the bulk of the report's solutions are lame. Most are meaningless jargon, such as suggesting that &quot;future components of the cyber infrastructure are built to be inherently secure and dependable for their users.&quot; A fantastic sentiment, but as mushy as stating that the president is &quot;for the children.&quot; What about making software vendors liable for bug-ridden products? Or rooting out insecure Microsoft products like the troubled SQL server in favor of more secure open-source solutions like <a href="http://www.openbsd.org/">OpenBSD</a>? </p>
<p>Nothing so bold is forthcoming in the <em>Strategy</em>. Which is yet another indicator that the czars of national computer security are perfectly content to tease out the hyperbole in perpetuity. The bigger the perceived threat, the greater their importance inside the Beltway.</p>Mon, 03 Mar 2003 18:53:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/03/bushs_cyberstrategery.htmlBrendan Koerner2003-03-03T18:53:00ZThe administration's war against a bogus threat.TechnologyThe nonexistent war against cyberterrorism.2079549Brendan KoernerWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2079549falsefalsefalseThe nonexistent war against cyberterrorism.The nonexistent war against cyberterrorism.Geeks Without Bordershttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/02/geeks_without_borders.html
<p> San Francisco's North Beach has a long history of eccentric street culture, but if you find yourself in the neighborhood this Saturday, you are likely to witness a new twist: small groups of people clustering together to read text off of cell-phone screens, then embarking on some kind of oddball group activity—retrieving a suitcase that's been hidden atop a tree, persuading strangers to try on insane outfits—and then huddling together again to peer at their cell phones. This strange behavior is part of something called the <a href="http://www.thegogame.com/">Go Game</a>, the creation of a company called Wink Back, Inc. (The next public game is scheduled for Feb. 22.) The game's creators scatter clues and tools across the city, and then wirelessly transmit a series of challenges to the teams as they prowl the streets. One challenge might ask the team to locate a package lurking underneath &quot;a piece of federal property&quot;—which turns out to be a mailbox—and report back the cross streets once the package has been discovered. Another might send players off looking for a specific date inscribed on a &quot;vaguely homoerotic statue.&quot; Other challenges look like street theater: Find a goodwill store and dress up in costumes that &quot;represent opposites.&quot; Once each challenge has been completed, the game's puppetmasters beam down a new one. It's urban <em>Survivor</em> with cell phones.</p>
<p>And now for something that seems completely different: Visit the Web site for the law firm of <a href="http://www.landau-luckman-lake.com/">Landau, Luckman, and Lake</a>, along with this informative tour of <a href="http://www.nru.us/">New River University</a>. Both seem like reputable outfits, but in fact they are fake sites, created as launching pads for an online scavenger hunt that goes by the name L3. About a month ago, an e-mail with the cryptic message, &quot;Jake needs help!!!&quot; alongside links to the two sites appeared in a handful of inboxes (selected because their owners had participated in similar online quests in the past). Since then, investigators have scoured the Web for clues that make sense of the unfolding mystery. So far, it's involved secret messages hidden in the source code of a Geocities Web page, a Yahoo! <a href="http://profiles.yahoo.com/landau_luckman_lake">profile</a> for landau_luckman_lake, and a series of files concealed in digital images using the steganography encryption technique allegedly used by Bin Laden's minions. Like the challenges of the Go Game, L3 unfolds as a series of &quot;tests&quot;: Players break various codes and ciphers, then send their solutions back to the e-mail address of a fictitious lawyer named Stephen Lake, who sends a confirmation note if the answer is correct. </p>
<p>L3 takes place in virtual space, while the Go Game unfolds on actual city streets. But they share a common denominator: the widening of the game environment. Most forms of entertainment are defined by their edges: the outline of the Monopoly board or the dimensions of a movie screen. To enter the world of the game or the story, you enter a confined space, set off from the real world. Play-space doesn't overlap with ordinary space. But Go and L3 don't play by those rules. Go colonizes an entire city for its playing field; L3 colonizes the entire Web. These are games without frontiers. </p>
<p>As Howard Rheingold describes in his fascinating 2002 book, <em> <a href="http://www.smartmobs.com/index.html">Smart Mobs</a></em>, the combination of cheap wireless devices, urban density, and teenagers is creating a new model of sidewalk theater. For several years, Scandanavian kids have been playing a cell-phone-based game called <a href="http://www.botfighters.com/welcome/">BotFighters</a>, which is basically a high-tech version of paintball, played in city centers. Gangs of players roam through the streets locating opponents using the mobile positioning technology built into their phones. If they find an opponent, they send a special SMS text message, and the service determines if the target was close enough for a hit. <a href="http://www.itsalive.com/">It's Alive</a>, the Helsinki-based company that created BotFighters, has created a new, more ambitious title called <a href="http://www.itsalive.com/games/gamedetails.asp?Message=262">Supafly</a>, a role-playing game billed as &quot;a location-based virtual soap opera where intrigues, gang conflicts, and romance are the tools of the trade for becoming a virtual celebrity.&quot; </p>
<p>Immersive gaming is thriving online as well. The ambitious <a href="http://www.howstuffworks.com/majestic.htm">Majestic</a>—a game that spun an elaborate online espionage tale—was a failure for Electronic Arts a few years ago, but the brilliant promotional campaign for Steven Spielberg's film <em>A.I.</em>, which embedded a trail of fake sites and personae across the Web, was better received than the movie itself. (BMW created a similar Web-wide trail to promote its <a href="http://www.bmwfilms.com/clap.asp?template=international&amp;country=&amp;film=">BMW Films</a> site.) Recently, a company called MindQuest Entertainment launched <a href="http://www.terraquest1.com/">TerraQuest</a>, an online scavenger hunt that promised to dole out $25,000 in prizes along the way. </p>
<p>In addition to being immersive and digital, there is one other element these games have in common: They are team sports. (That's why they're &quot;mobs&quot; as well as &quot;smart.&quot;) The <em>A.I.</em> mystery was solved by a distributed group of players sharing tips and new discoveries—they even had a name, <a href="http://www.cloudmakers.org/">the Cloudmakers</a>. One of the chief Cloudmakers—a fellow named Josh Babetski—has created a Web site called <a href="http://www.collectivedetective.org/">Collective Detective</a>, designed to help decipher online games such as L3, through what the site calls &quot;real-time human information filtering.&quot; (L3 is apparently the creation of a few CD members, though they have remained anonymous to date.) One investigator groping through these games' tangled webs can get lost very quickly, but when dozens are sharing their latest discoveries, the puzzles grow easier to crack. The first stage of the TerraQuest game was scheduled to run for about a month, but the Collective Detective members managed to solve the case in three days. </p>
<p>In the David Fincher suspense movie, <em>The Game</em>, Michael Douglas undergoes a terrifying series of life-or-death adventures that may, or may not, be staged by a Wink Back-like company called Consumer Recreation Services. As projects like Supafly and L3 grow in number, the existential doubt that was at the heart of that movie—is this real or is this immersive media?—is likely to become increasingly commonplace. The next time you see a strange street sign in your neighborhood, it might just be a prop in someone else's entertainment, and the next Google search results page you pull down might contain a link to a node in the L3 universe. That's the thing about games without frontiers. You never really know when you're playing.</p>Mon, 17 Feb 2003 16:58:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/02/geeks_without_borders.htmlSteven Johnson2003-02-17T16:58:00ZTechnologyGeeks without borders.2078579Steven JohnsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2078579falsefalsefalseGeeks without borders.Geeks without borders.Don't Pay To Playhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/01/dont_pay_to_play.html
<p>Visit the site of almost any large game company—not to mention download sites like <a href="http://www.fileplanet.com/">fileplanet.com</a>—and you'll find hundreds of freely distributed, fully playable versions of the latest PC games. To be sure, the downloadable files are not the complete, shrink-wrapped version you'd buy in a store. For example, the sports titles will offer one matchup between two predetermined teams, and other games usually offer one or two levels that you can play through. By comparison, the version you shell out $40 for offers a few dozen levels or a full league of teams. But at a time when the free distribution of digital entertainment is a somewhat controversial matter, this creates an interesting state of affairs. Video game companies are effectively subsidizing our ability to play their games for free.</p>
<p>After all,<strong></strong>getting these games into the hands of eager players is not cheap. For one thing, the file sizes are massive, some of them more than 100 MB. (Too big to download using a dial-up modem, but only an hour's worth of downloading via cable or T1.) And, not surprising given the price-point, the demand for these games is extensive. The combination of thousands of people simultaneously downloading immense files can lead to only one result: immense bandwidth costs for the game providers.</p>
<p>Why are the game companies so keen to give their product away? The video game industry has a long history of borrowing tricks from the movie business, and these downloadable games are no exception: They're the gamer equivalent of movie trailers, which are also freely distributed on the Web. Like trailers, the demo versions are designed to whet your appetite for a title rather than satiate it.</p>
<p>But movie trailers make economic sense because movies are narrative experiences. Most of the time, seeing a fragment of a story makes you more interested in seeing the whole thing. But while most video games follow some sort of obligatory narrative, I suspect few gamers are drawn to these titles because of their storytelling. Video games are experiential—they're about dropping into an interesting new environment, checking it out for a while, and then moving on.</p>
<p>The game companies' willingness to subsidize the market for free demos suggests that they think the primary appeal of video games is narrative: completing all the objectives, making it through all the levels—in other words, getting to the end of the story. This may well be a major attraction for younger players who have endless time and patience for this sort of thing. But for an elderly gamer like myself (I'm 34), making it to the end of the story is overkill. It takes around 50 hours to complete most of these games. That's time that most people with a job or a family do not have.</p>
<p>Consider my experience with <a href="http://www.eidosinteractive.com/downloads/demo.html">Eidos Interactive's</a> recent title Hitman 2. I was intrigued by the early press on this game because it belonged to the &quot;first-person stealth&quot; genre: While there's no shortage of violence in them, stealth games reward you for being quiet, for lurking in the shadows before you go in for the kill. Hitman 2 was supposed to be one of the most accomplished of the genre—and in fact, the introductory level I played, set in a Sicilian mafia palace straight out of the <em>Godfather</em> series, was entrancing. I'd creep around the grounds for 10 minutes, then pounce on a sentry, then go back to creeping. I worked my way through the assassination over three nights and enjoyed every minute of it.</p>
<p>But when the time came to pony up for the real version—which promised to take me from St. Petersburg to Kuala Lumpur and beyond—I didn't feel the need to dig any further. This was partially because, at this pace, committing myself to finishing the full game was going to be a monthlong affair. And partially because I wanted to throw myself into the free demo for <a href="http://nolf2.sierra.com/">No One Lives Forever 2</a>. No doubt the gaming market is driven by 15-year-olds who are dying to travel to St. Petersburg after sampling Sicily for free. But the gaming business already owns that demographic. If they're going to continue to grow at the rate they've grown over the past 10 years, they need to attract the generation raised on Pac-Man and Intellivision, precisely the crowd that has little interest in playing games all the way to their conclusion. </p>
<p>For a grown-up gamer, the Hitman 2 download was the perfect size: just enough game-play to get a taste of the action but not enough to alienate the boss or the wife. And right now, you can't beat the price.</p>Tue, 14 Jan 2003 15:37:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/01/dont_pay_to_play.htmlSteven Johnson2003-01-14T15:37:00ZWhy grown-ups shouldn't spend money on video games.TechnologyWhy adults should never pay for video games.2076653Steven JohnsonWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2076653falsefalsefalseWhy adults should never pay for video games.Why adults should never pay for video games.Put the Compact Disc Out of Its Miseryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/01/put_the_compact_disc_out_of_its_misery.html
<p>This spring, the compact disc celebrates the 20<sup>th</sup> anniversary of its arrival in stores, which puts the once-revolutionary music format two decades behind Moore's Law. The IBM PC, introduced about a year and a half earlier, has been revved up a thousandfold in performance since 1983. But the CD has whiled away the time, coasting on its Reagan-era breakthroughs in digital recording and storage. The two technologies, the PC and the CD, merged not long after their debuts—try to buy a computer without a disc player. But the relationship has become a dysfunctional one. The computer long ago outgrew its stagnant partner.</p>
<p>To the new generation of music artists and engineers, &quot;CD-quality sound&quot; is an ironic joke. In recording studios, today's musicians produce their works digitally at resolutions far beyond the grainy old CD standard. To make the sounds listenable on antiquarian CD players, the final mix is retrofitted to compact disc specs by stripping it of billions of bits' worth of musical detail and dynamics. It's like filming a movie in IMAX and then broadcasting it only to black-and-white TV sets.</p>
<p>It doesn't have to be this way. The modern recording studio is built around computers, Macs or PCs. Beefed up with high-performance analog-to-digital converters and super-sized disk drives, they digitize music up to 192,000 times per second, storing it as 24-bit data samples. That &quot;192/24&quot; standard captures more than a thousand times as much detail as the CD's &quot;44.1/16&quot; resolution. Moreover, this music data is just another computer file, an icon on a desktop. Double-click it, and it plays. It would play on your home computer, too, if you could get your hands on it.&nbsp;All you would need to enjoy studio-quality sound at home are high-end speakers or an amplifier with digital connections to your computer.&nbsp;That's the &quot;digital hub&quot; scenario touted by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others. Plug everything into a home network, load up the computer with tunes, and press play from anywhere in the house. A three-minute pop song in 192/24 format fills about 200 megabytes of hard-disk space, which means Dell's latest 200-gigabyte drive could hold nearly a thousand of them. </p>
<p>But instead of gearing up for digital home hubs, record companies have rolled out two more shiny-disc formats: DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD. Both sound great, but you're forgiven if you haven't heard of them. Following the radical makeover of consumer electronics in the past two decades, these discs have wandered in like Rip Van Winkle, unaware how behind the times they are.</p>
<p>In sound quality, at least, each disc brings the listening experience up to modern standards. DVD-A, developed by an <a href="http://www.dvdforum.org/forum.shtml">audio industry working group</a>, pumps up the old CD format 500 to 1,000 times in data density to match that now used in studios. SACD, on the other hand, is based on a new form of digital recording developed by Sony and Philips that converts sound waves into bits (and back again) more smoothly. Both bring studio data to the listener, bit for bit, and include extra surround-sound channels for home-theater systems. Properly engineered, their improvement over CD sound is striking. Can the average person hear the difference? Instantly. As Fred Kaplan <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2069628/">noted</a> this past summer in <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>, it's enough to make you buy new speakers. </p>
<p>Yet both kinds of discs, despite being developed in the 'Net-head late '90s, are odd throwbacks to the pre-PC era. Most obviously, they're the same size as the original CD. Can you name any other digital device that hasn't shrunk in 20 years? The players for them are bulky, closer in size to Sony's first CD decks than to Apple's iPod, which holds 400 albums rather than just one.</p>
<p>Flip one of the players over, and you'll find another retro sight: analog output jacks. To prevent buyers from running off bit-for-bit copies of the new discs, gear-makers have agreed not to put digital ports on either DVD-A or SACD players. Yet old-fashioned analog connections erode pristine digital sound and are prone to interference from televisions, lights, and computers—the objects they'll be placed next to in modern homes.</p>
<p>The real deal-breaker is that a stand-alone player is the only kind available. By manufacturers' consensus, there won't be any network ports on the players, nor will there be any DVD-A or SACD drives available for computers. Some makers are promising a digital link from the player to a home-theater console, but it'll be deliberately incompatible with any of the jacks on a computer. In bringing the CD up to date with the PC, the music industry is also trying to split the two technologies asunder again.</p>
<p>It's no wonder that gearheads who buy the latest, greatest everything have ignored DVD-A and SACD in favor of MP3 players and CD burners. Computer-friendly music formats let you archive hundreds of albums on a laptop, create custom playlists that draw from your entire collection, and download them to portable players smaller than a single CD jewel box. Today's fans want their music in a form that fits the pocket-sized, personalized, interconnected world of their computers, cameras, phones, and PDAs. Asking digital consumers to give that power back in exchange for a better-sounding disc is like offering them a phonograph needle.</p>Mon, 06 Jan 2003 16:26:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2003/01/put_the_compact_disc_out_of_its_misery.htmlPaul Boutin2003-01-06T16:26:00ZThe new CDs: Neither compact nor disks. Discuss.TechnologyThe new CDs: Neither compact nor disks. Discuss.2076336Paul BoutinWebheadhttp://www.slate.com/id/2076336falsefalsefalseThe new CDs: Neither compact nor disks. Discuss.The new CDs: Neither compact nor disks. Discuss.